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2011

• Matthias Hert, Gerald Reif, Harald C. Gall, A Comparison of RDB-to-RDF Mapping Languages, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Semantic Systems (I-Semantics) 2011. (inproceedings)
  

  Mapping Relational Databases (RDB) to RDF is an active field of research. The majority of data on the current Web is stored in RDBs. Therefore, bridging the conceptual gap between the relational model and RDF is needed to make the data available on the Semantic Web. In addition, recent research has shown that Semantic Web technologies are useful beyond the Web, especially if data from different sources has to be exchanged or integrated. Many mapping languages and approaches were explored leading to the ongoing standardization effort of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) carried out in the RDB2RDF Working Group (WG). The goal and contribution of this paper is to provide a feature-based comparison of the state-of-the-art RDB-to-RDF mapping languages. It should act as a guide in selecting a RDB-to-RDF mapping language for a given application scenario and its requirements w.r.t. mapping features. Our comparison framework is based on use cases and requirements for mapping RDBs to RDF as identified by the RDB2RDF WG. We apply this comparison framework to the state-of-the-art RDB-to-RDF mapping languages and report the findings in this paper. As a result, our classification proposes four categories of mapping languages: direct mapping, read-only general-purpose mapping, read-write general-purpose mapping, and special-purpose mapping. We further provide recommendations for selecting a mapping language.

  
• Matthias Hert, Sergio Marsella, Gerald Reif, Harald C. Gall, UpLink - A Linked Data Editor for RDB-to-RDF Data, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Semantic Systems (I-Semantics) 2011. (inproceedings/Short Paper)
  

  Linked Data builds a machine-processable Web of Data based on a large and growing number of RDF datasets and typed links among them. For the human user, Web-based interfaces were developed to enable browsing and editing Linked Data that is stored as native RDF. However, the majority of data on the current Web is stored in Relational Databases (RDB). This is a challenge for Linked Data browsers and especially for Linked Data editors. In this paper, we present UpLink which is to the best of our knowledge the first Linked Data editor for RDB-to-RDF data, i.e., RDF data that is mapped on demand from a RDB. We further present usage scenarios to demonstrate that UpLink supports the basic CRUD operations for editing Linked Data.

  

2010

• Matthias Hert, Gerald Reif, Harald C. Gall, 'Semantic Web 2.0' - Write-enabling the Web of Data, Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives (SWAP), September 2010. (inproceedings)
  

  The Semantic Web today is mainly a read-only Web of Data. Many of the data sets that contribute to the Semantic Web are not stored as native RDF, but generated on demand via wrappers. Despite the fact that user contribution is the key success factor in the Web 2.0, current wrapper approaches and standardization efforts still focus on read-only data access. In this paper, we argue that the Semantic Web should learn from the evolution of the Web 2.0 and consider write-enabled semantic data wrappers.

  
• Michael Würsch, Gerald Reif, Serge Demeyer, Harald C. Gall, Fostering Synergies - How Semantic Web Technology could influence Software Repositories, Proceedings of the 2nd Intl. Workshop on Search-driven development: Users, Infrastructure, Tools and Evaluation (SUITE)., May 2010. (inproceedings/Workshop paper)
  

  The state-of-the-art in mining software repositories mirrors software artifacts from various sources into monolithic relational databases. This puts a lot of querying power in the hands of the software miners, however it comes at the cost of enclosing the data and hamper cross-application reuse. In this paper we discuss four problem scenarios to illustrate that Semantic Web technology is able to overcome these limitations. However, it requires that the software engineering research community agrees on two prerequisites: (a) a common vocabulary to talk about software repositories -- an ontology; (b) a strategy for generating unique and stable references to all software artifacts inside such a repository - a Universal Resource Identifier (URI).

  
• Michael Würsch, Giacomo Ghezzi, Gerald Reif, Harald C. Gall, Supporting Developers with Natural Language Queries, Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Software Engineering, May 2010, IEEE Computer Society. (inproceedings)
  

  The feature list of modern IDEs is growing steadily and mastering these tools becomes more and more demanding, especially for novice programmers. Despite their remarkable capabilities, IDEs often still cannot directly answer the questions that arise during program comprehension tasks. Instead developers have to map their questions to multiple concrete queries that can be answered only by combining several tools and examining the output of each of them manually to distill an appropriate answer. Existing approaches have in common that they are either limited to a set of predefined, hardcoded questions, or that they require to learn a specific query language only suitable for that limited purpose. We present a framework to query for information about a software system using guided-input natural language resembling plain English. For that, we model data extracted by classical software analysis tools with an OWL ontology and use knowledge processing technologies from the Semantic Web to query it. We also present a case study that demonstrates how our framework can be used to answer queries about static source code information for program comprehension purposes.

  
• Matthias Hert, Gerald Reif, Harald C. Gall, Updating Relational Data via SPARQL/Update, EDBT Workshop Proceedings, March 2010. (inproceedings)
  

  Relational Databases (RDBs) are used in most current enterprise environments to store and manage data. The semantics of the data is not explicitly encoded in the relational model, but implicitly at the application level. Ontologies and Semantic Web technologies provide explicit semantics that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. Converting all relational data to RDF is often not feasible, therefore we adopt a mediation approach for ontology-based access to RDBs. Existing mapping approaches focus on read-only access via SPARQL or as Linked Data but other data access interfaces exist, including approaches for updating RDF data. In this paper we present OntoAccess, an extensible platform for ontology-based read and write access to existing relational data. It encapsulates the translation logic in the core layer that provides the foundation of an extensible set of data access interfaces in the interface layer. We further present the formal definition of our RDB-to-RDF mapping, the architecture of our mediator platform, and a performance evaluation of the prototype implementation.

  

2009

• Editor(s): Hong-Linh Truong, Gerald Reif, Schahram Dustdar, Harald C. Gall. DMC - Distributed and Mobile Collaboration. (proceedings)
  
  
• Harald C. Gall, Gerald Reif, ICSE 2009 Tutorial - Semantic Web Technologies in Software Engineering , 31th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2009), May 18 2009. (inproceedings/tutorial)
  

  Over the years, the software engineering community has developed various tools to support the specification, development, and maintainance of software. Many of these tools use proprietary data formats to store artifacts which hamper interoperability. On the other hand, the Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. Ontologies are used to define the concepts in the domain of discourse and their relationships and as such provide the formal vocabulary applications use to exchange data. Besides the Web, the technologies developed for the Semantic Web have proven to be useful also in other domains, especially when data is exchanged between applications from different parties. Software engineering is one of these domains in which recent research shows that Semantic Web technologies are able to reduce the barriers of proprietary data formats and enable interoperability. In this tutorial, we present Semantic Web technologies and their application in software engineering. We discuss the current status of ontologies for software entities, bug reports, or change requests, as well as semantic representations for software and its documentation. This way, architecture, design, code, or test models can be shared across application boundaries enabling a seamless integration of engineering results.

  
• Matthias Hert, Gerald Reif, Harald C. Gall, Personal Knowledge Mapping with Semantic Web Technologies, Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Personal Knowledge Management at the 5th Conference on Professional Knowledge Management, March 2009. (inproceedings)
  

  Semantic Web technologies promise great benefits for Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and Knowledge Management (KM) in general when data needs to be exchanged or integrated. However, the Semantic Web also introduces new issues rooted in its distributed nature as multiple ontologies exist to encode data in the Personal Information Management (PIM) domain. This poses problems for applications processing this data as they would need to support all current and future PIM ontologies. In this paper, we introduce an approach that decouples applications from the data representation by providing a mapping service which translates Semantic Web data between different vocabularies. Our approach consists of the RDF Data Transformation Language (RDTL) to define mappings between different but related ontologies and the prototype implementation RDFTransformer to apply mappings. This allows the definition of mappings that are more complex than simple one-to-one matches.

  
• Tobias Bannwart, Amancio Bouza, Gerald Reif, Abraham Bernstein, Private Cross-page Movie Recommendations with the Firefox add-on OMORE, 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009), October 2009. (inproceedings/Semantic Web Challenge)
  

  Online stores and Web portals bring information about a myriad of items such as books, CDs, restaurants or movies at the user's fingertips. Although, the Web reduces the barrier to the information, the user is overwhelmed by the number of available items. Therefore, recommender systems aim to guide the user to relevant items. Current recommender systems store user ratings on the server side. This way the scope of the recommendations is limited to this server only. In addition, the user entrusts the operator of the server with valuable information about his preferences. Thus, we introduce the private, personal movie recommender OMORE, which learns the user model based on the user's movie ratings. To preserve privacy, OMORE is implemented as Firefox add-on which stores the user ratings and the learned user model locally at the client side. Although OMORE uses the features from the movie pages on the IMDb site, it is not restricted to IMDb only. To enable cross-referencing between various movie sites such as IMDb, Amazon.com, Blockbuster, Netflix, Jinni, or Rotten Tomatoes we introduce the movie cross-reference database LiMo which contributes to the Linked Data cloud.

  
• Amancio Bouza, Gerald Reif, Abraham Bernstein, Probabilistic Partial User Model Similarity for Collaborative Filtering, Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Inductive Reasoning and Machine Learning on the Semantic Web (IRMLeS2009) at the 6th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2009), June 2009. (inproceedings)
  

  Recommender systems play an important role in supporting people getting items they like. One type of recommender systems is user-based collaborative filtering. The fundamental assumption of user-based collaborative filtering is that people who share similar preferences for common items behave similar in the future. The similarity of user preferences is computed globally on common rated items such that partial preference similarities might be missed. Consequently, valuable ratings of partially similar users are ignored. Furthermore, two users may even have similar preferences but the set of common rated items is too small to infer preference similarity. We propose first, an approach that computes user preference similarities based on learned user preference models and second, we propose a method to compute partial user preference similarities based on partial user model similarities. For users with few common rated items, we show that user similarity based on preferences significantly outperforms user similarity based on common rated items.

  
• Matthias Hert, Gerald Reif, Harald C. Gall, SPARQL/Update for Relational Databases, Proceedings of the 6th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), June 2009. (inproceedings/Poster)
  

  We present an approach for ontology-based read and write access to existing Relational Databases (RDBs). SPARQL/Update serves as the data manipulation language that is translated to equivalent SQL commands according to mappings between the RDBs and the Semantic Web. This addition of write support enables a full integration of existing relational data into Semantic Web applications.

  

2008

• Editor(s): Gerald Reif, Harald C. Gall, Hong-Linh Truong, Schahram Dustdar. DMC - Distributed and Mobile Collaboration - Workshop Report. (proceedings)
  

  Distributed collaborations within networked enterprises and e-science have been changing radically over the last years. Enterprises and e-science environments demand increased flexibility, interconnectivity, and autonomy of involved systems as well as new coordination and interaction styles for collaboration among people. The latest trends in distributed and mobile collaboration technologies allow people to work across organizational boundaries and to collaborate among/in organizations and communities. The ability to access the organization's distributed knowledge base and to cooperate with co-workers is still a requirement, but new paradigms such as service-oriented computing and Grid computing increase pervasiveness, and mobility enable new scenarios and lead to higher complexity of systems. Independently of the business and e-science domains, individual "collaboration" has become a hot issue. Virtual communities have enjoyed a tremendous popularity recently and are starting to require functionalities for collaboration in the broadest sense similar to those in business and e-science environments. The wide-spread availability of mobile devices makes support for mobility an arising topic in this domain as well. Many questions to fully enable such scenarios are the subject of ongoing research and are attracting more attention still. For example: How to enable users to retain their ability to cooperate while not being in their home environment? What is the role of context and location in determining how cooperation can be carried out? How can resources be described semantically in a meaningful way to more efficiently exploit the limited resources in mobile environments by supporting better ways of providing data relevant to the user, enabling improved interoperability with the environment and with other mobile users, and deciding when and how to process data? How to provide support for ad-hoc cooperation in situations where the dedicated infrastructure is absent or cannot be used? How will service-oriented computing and Grid computing change collaborative software? How to support software in diverse, small devices such as PDAs and smartphones to access heterogeneous, large-scale resources, such as in the Grid, for large scale collaboration and teamwork, such as in disaster scenarios. How to provide interoperable collaboration services? Which is the shared vocabulary to be used to achieve a common understanding at the semantic level when the collaboration takes place over community or enterprise boundaries?

  
• Amancio Bouza, Gerald Reif, Abraham Bernstein, Harald C. Gall, SemTree: Ontology-Based Decision Tree Algorithm for Recommender Systems, In Proceedings of the 7th International Semantic Web Conference, October 2008. (inproceedings/Poster)
  

  Recommender systems play an important role in supporting people when choosing items from an overwhelming huge number of choices. So far, no recommender system makes use of domain knowledge. We are modeling user preferences with a machine learning approach to recommend people items by predicting the item ratings. Specifically, we propose SemTree, an ontology-based decision tree learner, that uses a reasoner and an ontology to semantically generalize item features to improve the effectiveness of the decision tree built. We show that SemTree outperforms comparable approaches in recommending more accurate recommendations considering domain knowledge.

  
• Ansgar Bernardi, Stefan Decker, Ludger van Elst, Gunnar Grimnes, Tudor Groza, Siegfried Handschuh, Mehdi Jazayeri, Cedric Mesnage, Knud Möller, Gerald Reif, Michael Sintek, The Social Semantic Desktop - A New Paradigm Towards Deploying the Semantic Web on the Desktop, Semantic Web Engineering in the Knowledge Society, Editor(s): Jorge Cardoso, Miltiadis D. Lytras; 2008, IGI Global. (incollection)
  

  This chapter introduces the general vision of the Social Semantic Desktop (SSD) and details it in the context of the NEPOMUK project. It outlines the typical SSD requirements and functionalities that were identified from real world scenarios. In addition, it provides the design of the standard SSD architecture together with the ontology pyramid developed to support it. Finally, the chapter gives an overview of some of the technical challenges that arise from the actual development process of the SSD.

  
• Harald C. Gall, Gerald Reif, Tutorial - Semantic Web Technologies in Software Engineering, 30th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2008), May 12 2008. (inproceedings/tutorial)
  

  Over the years, the software engineering community has developed various tools to support the specification, development, and maintainance of software. Many of these tools use proprietary data formats to store artifacts which hamper interoperability. However, the Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. Ontologies are used define the concepts in the domain of discourse and their relationships and as such provide the formal vocabulary applications use to exchange data. Beside the Web, the technologies developed for the Semantic Web have proven to be useful also in other domains, especially when data is exchanged between applications from different parties. Software engineering is one of these domains in which recent research shows that Semantic Web technologies are able to reduce the barriers of proprietary data formats and enable interoperability. In this tutorial, we present Semantic Web technologies and their application in software engineering. We discuss the current status of ontologies for software entities, bug reports, or change requests, as well as semantic representations for software and its documentation. This way, architecture, design, code, or test models can be shared across application boundaries enabling a seamless integration of engineering results.

  

2007

• Editor(s): Siegfried Handschuh, Gerald Reif. 1st Workshop on Architecture, Design, and Implementation of the Semantic Desktop. (proceedings)
  
  
• Gian Marco Laube, Gerald Reif, Harald C. Gall, Architectural Issues of the Semantic Clipboard as Ontology Mediation Service, 1st Workshop on Architecture, Design, and Implementation of the Semantic Desktop (SemDeskDesign2007) at the Eurpean Semantic Web Conference ESWC2007, June 2007. (inproceedings)
  

  When copying and pasting data between applications using the operating system clipboard, the semantics of the transfered information is usually lost. Using Semantic Web technologies these semantics can be explicitly de?ned in a machine process-able way. In previous research we developed a prototype to show the feasibility and bene?ts from a semantic enriched clipboard, that was limited to the number of ontologies it could handle or application that could access it. In this paper we introduce an advanced architecture for the Semantic Clipboard that incorporates the standard communication paradigm of operating system clipboards and is able to handle RDF graphs of arbitrary domains of interest. This architecture includes a data mediation service that overcomes vocabulary heterogeneities between source and target applications.

  
• Gerald Reif, Tudor Groza, Siegfried Handschuh, Cedric Mesnage, Mehdi Jazayeri, Rosa Gudjonsdottir, Collaboration on the Social Semantic Desktop, Workshop on Ubiquitous Mobile Information and Collaboration Systems (UMICS 2007) at CAiSE 2007, June 2007, Springer. (inproceedings)
  

  To accomplish the daily work people use several desktop applications to collaborate with co-workers. Each application is specialized on a speci?c domain, such as document management, email, or time planning. Although the data is distributed over several applications the data is highly interlinked from the user?s point of view. The Social Semantic Desktop aims to take advantage of Semantic Web technologies on the computer?s desktop to better support the user?s mental working model and to enable collaboration over enterprise boundaries. In this paper we present our ongoing work on the Social Semantic Desktop as collaboration environment. We present the intended usage scenarios, discuss the required services and give an outlook on the architecture we envision for the Social Semantic Desktop.

  
• Katharina Reinecke, Gerald Reif, Abraham Bernstein, Cultural User Modeling With CUMO: An Approach to Overcome the Personalization Bootstrapping Problem, First International Workshop on Cultural Heritage on the Semantic Web at the 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2007), November 12 2007. (inproceedings)
  

  The increasing interest in personalizable applications for heterogeneous user populations has heightened the need for a more efficient acquisition of start-up information about the user. We argue that the user?s cultural background is suitable for predicting various adaptation preferences at once. With these as a basis, we can accelerate the initial acquisition process. The paper presents an approach to factoring culture into user models. We introduce the cultural user model ontology CUMO, describing how and to which extend it can accurately represent the user?s cultural background. Furthermore, we outline its use as a re-usable and shared knowledge base in a personalization process, before presenting a plan of our future work towards cultural personalization.

  
• Knud Möller, Gerald Reif, Siegfried Handschuh, Moving Stuff - Linking Desktops with semiBlog, the Semantic Clipboard and RDFa, 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007), Developers Track, May 8-12 2007. (inproceedings/Demo)
  

  In this short paper we will demonstrate how embedded RDFa in Weblogs can be used as a medium for data-transfer between desktops. A combination of two existing Semantic Web tools - the desktop-based Semantic Blog authoring tool semiBlog and the Semantic Clipboard application - allows one user to export and blog data from various desktop applications such as electronic addressbooks, calendars or bibliographic databases, and another user to import the same data back into their own applications. http://sw.deri.org/~knud/papers/MetadataRoundtripWWW2007/

  
• Gerald Reif, Gian Marco Laube, Knud Möller, Harald C. Gall, SemClip - Overcoming the Semantic Gap Between Desktop Applications, 5th Semantic Web Challenge at the 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2007), November 11-15 2007. (inproceedings/Semantic Web Challenge)
  

  When copying and pasting data between applications using the operating system clipboard, the semantics of the transfered information is usually lost. Using Semantic Web technologies these semantics can be explicitly de?ned in a machine process-able way and therefore be preserved during the data transfer. In this paper we introduce SemClip, our implementation of a Semantic Clipboard that enables the exchange of semantically enriched data between desktop applications and show how such a clipboard can be used to copy and paste semantic annotations from Web pages to desktop applications.

  
• Tudor Groza, Siegfried Handschuh, Knud Möller, Gunnar Grimnes, Leo Sauermann, Enrico Minack, Gerald Reif, Rosa Gudjonsdottir, The NEPOMUK Project - On the Way to the Social Semantic Desktop, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Semantic Technologies (I-SEMANTICS 2007) 2007. (inproceedings)
  

  This paper introduces the NEPOMUK pro ject which aims to create a standard and reference implementation for the Social Semantic Desktop. We outline the requirements and functionalities that were identi?ed for a useful Semantic Desktop system and present an architecture that ful?lls these requirements which was acquired by incremental re?nement of the architecture of existing Semantic Desktop prototypes. The NEPOMUK pro ject is primarily motivated by three real-life industrial use-cases, we brie?y outline these and the processes used to extract required functionalities from the people working in these areas today, and we present a selection of typical tasks where the Semantic Desktop could be of bene?t.

  

2006

• Gerald Reif, Harald C. Gall, An Architecture for a Semantic Portal, International Workshop on Data Integration and Semantic Web (DISWeb'06) at the 18th Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2006), June 2006, Springer. (inproceedings)
  

  Current Web applications provide their information and functionalities to human users only. To make Web applications also accessible for machines, the Semantic Web proposes an extension of the current Web, that describes the semantics of the content and the services explicitly with machine-processable meta-data. In this paper we introduce an architecture of a Semantic Portal that provides a unique front-end to the information and functionalities of individual Semantic Web applications. To realize the portal we use WEESA to semantically annotate Web applications and provide the annotations in a knowledge base (KB) for download and querying. Based on that, the Semantic Harvester collects the KBs from individual Semantic Web applications to build the global KB of the Semantic Portal. Finally, we use Semantic Web services to make the portal a unique interface to the services of the Web applications.

  
• Gerald Reif, Semantic Annotation, Semantic Web - Wege zur vernetzten Wissensgesellschaft, Editor(s): Tassilo Pellegrini, Andreas Blumauer; 2006, Springer. (incollection)
  

  In diesem Kapitel wird zuerst der Begriff Semantische Annotation eingeführt und es werden Techniken besprochen um die Annotationen mit dem ursprünglichen Dokument zu verknüpfen. Weiters wird auf Probleme eingegangen, die sich beim Erstellen der Annotationen ergeben. Im Anschluss daran werden Software Tools vorgestellt, die einen Benutzer beim Annotierungsprozess unterstützen. Zum Abschluss werden Methoden diskutiert, die den Annotierungsvorgang in den Entwicklungsprozess einer Web Applikation integrieren.

  
• Gerald Reif, Martin Morger, Harald C. Gall, Semantic Clipboard - Semantically Enriched Data Exchange Between Desktop Applications, Semantic Desktop and Social Semantic Collaboration Workshopat the 5th International Semantic Web Conference ISWC06, November 2006. (inproceedings)
  

  The operating system clipboard is used to copy and paste data between applications even if the applications are from different vendors. Current clipboards only support the transfer of data or formatted data between applications. The semantics of the data, however, is lost in the transfer. The Semantic Web, on the other hand, provides a common framework that allows data to be shared across application boundaries while preserving the semantics of the data. In this paper we introduce the concept of a Semantic Clipboard and present a prototype implementation that can be used to copy and paste RDF meta-data between desktop applications. The Semantic Clipboard is based on a flexible plugin architecture that enables the easy extension of the clipboard to new ontology vocabularies and target applications. Furthermore, we show how the Semantic Clipboard is used to copy and paste the meta-data from semantically annotated Web pages to a user's desktop application.

  
• Gerald Reif, Harald C. Gall, Using WEESA to Semantically Annotate Cocoon Web Applications, 1st Semantic Authoring and Annotation Workshop 2006 at the 5th International Semantic Web Conference ISWC2006, November 2006. (inproceedings)
  

  The Semantic Web is based on the idea that Web applications provide semantically annotated Web pages. This meta-data is typically added in the semantic annotation process which is currently not part of the Web engineering process. Web engineering, however, proposes methodologies to design, implement and maintain Web applications but lack semantic annotation. In this paper we show how WEESA, a mapping from XML documents to ontologies, can be used in Apache Cocoon Web applications to semantically annotate Web pages. We introduce Cocoon transformer components that use the WEESA mapping definition to automatically generate RDF meta-data from XML documents. We further show how existing Cocoon Web applications can be extended to Semantic Web applications and discuss the experiences gained in an industry case study.

  

2005

• Clemens Kerer, Gerald Reif, Thomas Gschwind, Engin Kirda, Marek Paralic, ShareMe: Running a Distributed Systems Lab for 600 Students With Three Faculty Members, IEEE Transactions on Education Vol. 48 (3), August 2005. (article)
  

  The goal of the distributed systems (DS) laboratory is to provide an attractive environment in which students learn about network programming and apply some fundamental concepts of distributed systems. In the last two years, students had to implement a fully functional peer-to-peer file sharing system called ShareMe. This paper presents the approach the authors used to provide the best possible support and guidance for the students while keeping up with ever-rising participant numbers in the laboratory course (approximately 600 last year), as well as managing budget and personnel constraints. The learning environment is based on Web and Internet technologies and not only offers the description of the laboratory tasks but also covers electronic submission, a discussion forum, automatic grading, and online access to grading and test results. The authors report their experiences of using the automated grading system, the amount of work required to prepare and run the laboratory, and how they deal with students who submit plagiarized solutions. Furthermore, the results of student feedback and evaluation forms are presented, and the overall student course satisfaction is discussed. Detailed information about the DS laboratory is available at http://www.dslab.tuwien.ac.at

  
• Gerald Reif, Harald C. Gall, Mehdi Jazayeri, WEESA - Web Engineering for Semanitc Web Applications, Proceedings of the 14th International World Wide Web Conference, May 2005. (inproceedings)
  

  The success of the Semantic Web crucially depends on the existence ofWeb pages that provide machine-understandable meta-data. This meta-data is typically added in the semantic annotation process which is currently not part of theWeb engineering process. Web engineering, however, proposes methodologies to design, implement and maintain Web applications but lack the generation of meta-data. In this paper we introduce a technique to extend existing Web engineering methodologies to develop semantically annotated Web pages. The novelty of this approach is the definition of a mapping from XML Schema to ontologies, called WEESA, that can be used to automatically generate RDF meta-data from XML content documents. We further show how we integrated the WEESA mapping into an Apache Cocoon transformer to easily extend XML based Web applications to semantically annotated Web application.

  

2004

• Gerald Reif, Harald C. Gall, Mehdi Jazayeri, Towards Semantic Web Engineering: WEESA - Mapping XML Schema to Ontologies, Workshop on Application Design, Development and Implementation Issues in the Semantic Web at the 13th International World Wide Web Conference, May 2004, CEUR Workshop Proceedings. (inproceedings)
  

  The existence of semantically tagged Web pages is crucial to bring the Semantic Web to life. But it is still costly to develop and maintain Web applications that offer data and meta-data. Several standard Web engineering methodologies exist for designing and implementing Web applications. In this paper we introduce a technique to extend existing Web engineering techniques to develop semantically tagged Web applications. The novelty of this technique is the definition and implementation of a mapping from XML Schema to ontologies that can be used to automatically generate RDF meta-data from XML content documents.

  

2002

• Engin Kirda, Pascal Fenkam, Gerald Reif, Harald C. Gall, A service architecture for mobile teamwork, SEKE '02: Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Software engineering and knowledge engineering 2002, ACM. (inproceedings)
  

  Mobile teamwork has become an emerging requirement in the daily business of large enterprises. Employees collaborate across locations and need support while they are on the move. Business documents (artifacts) and expertise need to be shared independent of the actual location or connectivity (e.g., access through a mobile phone, laptop, Personal Digital Assistant, etc.) of employees. Although many collaboration tools and systems exist, most do not deal with new requirements such as locating artifacts and experts through distributed searches, advanced information subscription and notification, and mobile information sharing and access. The MOTION service architecture that we have developed supports mobile teamwork by taking into account the different connectivity modes of users, provides access support for various devices such as laptop computers and mobile phones, and uses XML meta-data and the XML Query Language (XQL) for distributed searches and subscriptions. In this paper, we describe the architecture and the components of our generic MOTION service platform for building collaborative applications. The MOTION Teamwork Services Components are currently being evaluated in two industry casestudies.

  
• Pascal Fenkam, Engin Kirda, Schahram Dustdar, Harald C. Gall, Gerald Reif, Evaluation of a Publish/Subscribe System for Collaborative and Mobile Working, Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies (WETICE), June 2002, IEEE Computer Society. (inproceedings)
  

  The MObile Teamwork Infrastructure for Organizations Networking (MOTION) service platform that we have designed and implemented addresses an emerging requirement in the daily business of large, distributed enterprises: support for mobile teamwork. Employees are often on the move and use a wide range of computing devices such as WAP phones, PDAs, notebooks and desktop computers. The service architecture that we have developed supports mobile teamwork by providing multi-device service access, XML meta data for information sharing and locating, and the XML Query Language (XQL) for distributed searches and publish/subscribe. We present the solution that we adopted in our prototype, analyze the shortcomings of this approach and based on our evaluation experiences, list the requirements for a publish-subscribe middleware for collaborative mobile working.

  
• Engin Kirda, Harald C. Gall, Pascal Fenkam, Gerald Reif, MOTION: a peer-to-peer platform for mobile teamwork support, Proceedings of the 26 th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC'02), August 2002. (inproceedings)
  

  Large, global enterprises are increasingly faced with the problem of supporting employees that are on the move. Employees need to share business documents, locate expertise and knowledge through distributed searches, access effective subscription/notification mechanisms, and they need any time, anywhere access to the company?s information resources. We address these problems and requirements in theMObile Teamwork Infrastructure for OrganizationsNetworking (MOTION) project and aim to create an advanced Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure for mobile teamwork. This short paper gives a brief description of the MOTION peer-to-peer platform for mobile teamwork.

  
• Schahram Dustdar, Harald C. Gall, Gerald Reif, Klaus Niederacher, Alexander Wahler, Poster: CONTESSA: A CONTEnt Semantic Service Agent, Proceedings of the 1st Workshops at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2002), June 2002, Springer. (inproceedings/Poster)
  
  
• Pascal Fenkam, Schahram Dustdar, Engin Kirda, Gerald Reif, Harald C. Gall, Towards an Access Control System for Mobile Peer-to-Peer Collaborative Environments, Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies (WETICE), June 2002, IEEE Computer Society. (inproceedings)
  

  Access control is one of the key requirements in enterprise security. A number of approaches in distributed systems have been designed that support various (new) paradigms such as peer-to-peer, nomadic working, and teamworking. Few of them, however, explicitly take into account the possible superposition of these concepts. Such a superposition often results in conflicting and additional requirements. We present ongoing work in developing an access control system for Peer-to-Peer mobile teamwork environments. This system is developed as part of the MOTION project. The goal of this project is to develop a service architecture for mobile teamwork, providing support for various devices and taking into account diverse connectivity modes. We present the requirements for an access control system that simultaneously supports mobility, collaboration, and peer-to-peer, illustrate our solution, and discuss how it meets the requirements.

  
• Engin Kirda, Gerald Reif, Harald C. Gall, Pascal Fenkam, TWSAPI: A Generic Teamwork Services Application Programming Interface, Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCSW) 2002, IEEE Computer Society. (inproceedings)
  

  One of the problems faced by large, global organizations and enterprises is to effectively enable their employees to collaborate across locations. People need collaborative work support while they are on the move and have to share business documents and know-how. Although much work has been done in the area of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) to date, supporting mobility is only recently receiving attention. Hence, most of the existing approaches do not deal with emerging mobile teamwork requirements such as locating business documents and expertise through distributed searches, advanced subscription and notification, community building, and mobile information sharing and access. Furthermore, existing applications and approaches are usually difficult to customize to business-specific processes and requirements. The MObile Teamwork Infrastructure for Organizations Networking (MOTION)1 system addresses these requirements and provides a generic teamwork services Application Programming Interface (API), TWSAPI, that can be used to build organization-specific collaborative applications. In this paper, we give an overview of the MOTION TWSAPI and illustrate its usage in building an application that provides document review support.

  

2001

• Gerald Reif, Engin Kirdar, Harald C. Gall, Gian Pietro Picco, Gianpaolo Cugola, Pascal Fenkam, A Web-based Peer-to-Peer Architecture for Collaborative Nomadic Working, 10th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, 2001. WET ICE 2001, June 2001. (inproceedings)
  

  With the recent advances in mobile computing, distributed organizations are facing a growing need for advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) that support mobile working. The ability to use information effectively anywhere and anytime has become a key business success factor: Although many Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) systems have been introduced to date, technologies and architectures that support the collaboration of nomadic workers on a wide range of mobile devices, notebooks and personal computers is still a challenge. The Mobile Teamwork Infrastructure for Organizations Networking (MOTION) project is aiming to design a highlyjexible, open and scalable ICT architecture for mobile collaboration. In this papeq we present the mobile collaboration requirements of two MOTION industry case studies, and highlight the advantages of a Web-based peer-to-peer architecture and for nomadic working.

  
• Engin Kirda, Harald C. Gall, Gerald Reif, Pascal Fenkam, Clemens Kerer, Supporting Mobile Users and Distributed Teamwork, 6th International Conference on Telecommunications (ConTEL 2001) 2001. (inproceedings)
  

  Recent years have shown a strong trend toward electronic information management in many fields. The use of office applications generated vast amounts of digital information and global multi-site organizations are increasingly faced with the need for advanced Information and Communication Technology (ICT) facilities for information management and distributed working. We address these requirements and problems in the MObile Teamwork Infrastructure for Organizations Networking (MOTION) 1 project and aim at creating a highly flexible, open and scalable ICT architecture for mobile teamwork support. In this paper, we discuss key concepts, design goals and requirements we have identified to build a component-based mobile teamwork ICT architecture for complex, multi-site, multi-process organizations. We give a brief overview of the MOTION architecture and technologies and introduce the evaluation criteria for the MOTION platform.

  

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