Now showing 1 - 10 of 212
  • Publication
    Facilitating asynchronous discussions in learning communities: the impact of moderation strategies
    ( 2007)
    Kienle, A.
    ;
    Ritterskamp, C.
    A facilitator or moderator is often responsible for supporting processes and their progress in learning communities. In this article we present an approach for supporting moderators of asynchronous processes in learning communities. This approach follows the socio-technical perspective: it includes a theory-based development of moderator tasks and the technical features designed to support these tasks. Starting with relevant work in this area, we describe our approach to moderator support in the collaborative learning environment KOLUMBUS 2. In a qualitative study, a professional moderator facilitated the discussion processes of a group of 12 students based on KOLUMBUS 2. The moderator used different methods and varying levels of participation intervention. The study showed that different intervention strategies led to different levels of student participation and different successes in finding common results at the end of the discussions. Suggestions for the design of technical features are also made.
  • Publication
    The extended process model - transforming process specifications into ontological representations
    ( 2006)
    Brocks, H.
    ;
    Meyer, H.
    ;
    Kamps, T.
    ;
    Begger, C.
    Knowledge-intensive processes arc often open ended and can be only weakly specified in traditional business process models. The extended process model provides a comprehensive integration of process and knowledge specific aspects within a single, ontological representation. In this article we describe the transformation of standardized business process definitions into a unified conceptual process model. We then apply our methodology to the scenario of IT services.
  • Publication
    A multiagent environment for the flexible enactment of knowledge-intensive processes
    ( 2006)
    Bayer, K.
    ;
    Kempf, S.
    ;
    Brocks, H.
    ;
    Kamps, T.
    Knowledge-intensive processes are characterized by vague specifications and a dynamic course of action. They require a flexible, knowledge-based enactment environment supporting the dynamic allocation of resources, changes in assignments, organizational structure, policies, and requirement and priorities, but also conflicts between resources participating in different processes. In this article, we present a multiagent enactment environment that incorporates the flexible allocation of resources but is also capable of handling various types of runtime exceptions. The benefits of adopting a knowledge-based approach are demonstrated based on a prototype implementation of an IT-Helpdesk scenario.
  • Publication
    From information design to experience design
    ( 2005)
    Streitz, N.A.
    ;
    Magerkurth, C.
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    Prante, T.
    ;
    Röcker, C.
  • Publication
    Designing smart artifacts for smart environments
    ( 2005)
    Streitz, N.A.
    ;
    Röcker, C.
    ;
    Prante, T.
    ;
    Alphen, D. van
    ;
    Stenzel, R.
    ;
    Magerkurth, C.
    Smart artifacts promise to enhance the relationships among participants in distributed working groups, maintaining personal mobility while offering opportunities for the collaboration, informal communication, and social awareness that contribute to the synergy and cohesiveness inherent in collocated teams.
  • Publication
    The layer-seeds term clustering method: Enabling proactive situation-aware product recommendations in e-commerce dialogues
    ( 2005)
    Chen, L.
    ;
    L'Abbate, M.
    ;
    Thiel, U.
    ;
    Neuhold, E.J.
    In e-commerce it is often crucial to provide customers a large choice of relevant offers. Users, however, seldom provides complete and comprehensive descriptions of their desires, therefore user interfaces are needed that can generate automatically expanded queries to the product database and proactively enrich the ongoing dialogue with recommendations of suitable products. Automatic query expansion is mostly based on thesaurus and/or user profiles. In e-commerce applications, specific thesauri reflecting the webstore's product categories are desirable. This work describes a method for the automatic construction of a thesaurus based on existing categories of documents. A clustering algorithm, the "Layer-Seeds method", is introduced, which facilitates the automatic generation of thesaurus reflecting the specific vocabulary occurring in a given collection of documents. The clustering works on terms extracted from the documents in a certain category and organizes them in a tree-like hierarchical structure-a thesaurus. The thesaurus is then employed for automatic query expansion in an e-commerce application in order to obtain better results for product searching. Experiments yield evidence that a significant increase of user satisfaction is achieved.
  • Publication