Projektbeginn: Juli 2010 (geplant)

Software-Cluster
„Softwareinnovationen für das Digitale Unternehmen“
(www.software-cluster.com)

Objectives:

Digital companies work in extremely flexible Internet-based corporate networks and dynamically align their business models and processes with these. All data concerning processes, facilities and resources of the real company are available at all times and in all areas for planning, control and optimization activities. The objective of the software cluster is to enable normal companies to be transformed into completely digital companies, in which ICT forms the decisive driver for product and process innovations. Studies forecast that 430,000 new jobs will be created in the software industry in Germany by 2030. Other objectives of the software cluster include the training of 5,000 specialists over the next 5 years, the foundation of 30 companies within the cluster’s core area, and attracting leading foreign companies to settle in the cluster region. Based on current figures, at least 300 million euros will need to be invested.

Approach:

The software cluster will develop concepts, technologies and business processes for emergent software within six projects – this represents an innovative leap within the corporate software sector, which is one of the most important areas of the German economy. Emergent software combines a wide range of components from different manufacturers in a dynamic and flexible manner, in order to fulfill the highly complex requirements of digital companies. Implementation of the cluster objectives demands a great deal of shared effort from both the science and business sectors as well as cross-company cooperation within the software cluster.

Region:

The software cluster includes the centers in Darmstadt, Kaiserslautern, Karlsruhe, Saarbrücken and Walldorf.

Partners:

Strategy board: DFKI - German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence GmbH, IESE - Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, IDS Scheer AG, IMC information multimedia communication AG, intelligent views gmbh, proAlpha Software AG, SAP AG, Seeburger AG, Software AG, Technische Universität Darmstadt
Industry & regional IT networks: CAS Software AG, Competence Center Computer Science, ConWeaver GmbH, Corisecio GmbH, CyberForum e.V., Dacos Software GmbH, 1&1 Internet AG, EUROSEC GmbH, IHK Darmstadt Service GmbH, Insiders Technologies GmbH, John Deere Werke Mannheim, KOBIL Systems GmbH, mineway GmbH, Netbiscuits GmbH, Ontoprise GmbH, SIEDA GmbH, Sirrix AG, STI Software Technologie Initiative Kaiserslautern e.V., Technologie-Initiative smartFactory KL e.V.
Research & development: DFKI - Innovative Retail Laboratory, Computer Science Research Center at the University of Karlsruhe, Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research, Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology, Fraunhofer Institute for Technical and Economic Mathematics, KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Kaiserslautern University of Technology, University of Saarland

Project Duration:

5 years (start 04/10 - end 03/15)

Support:

The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), with investments of more than 80 million eur

A Free, Open Source Case-Based Reasoning Tool (started in 2005)

myCBR is a plugin for the open source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework Protégé. The plugin allows you to easily model similarity measures for symbolic and numeric attributes using graphical editors.

Find more information on the myCBR homepage.

Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge (2006-2008)

The goal of NEPOMUK is to realize the Social Semantic Desktop. This term denotes a completely new computer desktop paradigm. The desktop will be semantic since it will make content accessible to processing by the computer. It will be social since it will support the interconnection and exchange with other desktops and their users.  NEPOMUK addresses any person who uses computers for non-trivial processing and sharing of information, typically related to complex decision making.

Find more information on the NEPOMUK homepage .

Collaboration for Internet Rating, Certification, Labelling, and Evaluation of Health Information Systems (2002-2003)

The European project MedCIRCLE builds on, expands and continues work on rating health information on the Internet piloted within the MedCERTAIN project. Both projects - MedCIRCLE and MedCERTAIN - are complementary projects with the overall objective to develop and promote technologies able to guide consumers to trustworthy health information on the Internet, to establish a global web of trust for networked health information, and to empower consumers to "filter" or positively select high quality health information on the web.

Find more information on the MedCIRCLE homepage.

Intelligent Sales Assistants for the World Wide Web (1998-2000)

The ESPRIT project WEBSELL developed new Intelligent Sales Support technology and products for the World Wide Web. These products support web shoppers in two aspects of the sales process neglected before on the Web; helping the customer to select or configure the product that meets her needs and supporting the customer in navigating through the space of possible product alternatives.

Intelligent Product Catalogues on CD-ROM (1998-2000)

Applying an intelligent sales assistant for electro-mechanical parts using a fuzzy search system for CD-ROM catalogues.

Information and Knowledge Reengineering for Reasoning from Cases (1996-1999)

The ESPRIT project Inreca II was the successor of the project Inreca (Induction and Reasoning from Cases). The major concern of Inreca II was to offer an experience-based (development of a) methodology and a set of tools that supports the methodology for guiding CBR application development, validation, and maintenance. The Inreca II methodology is composed of a set of steps, guidelines and recommendations that allow a primarily non-CBR user to build, to validate, to maintain, and to scale up a CBR application. These steps include the initial understanding of the CBR technique, the building and the maintenance of a CBR application, and the evaluation, qualification and acceptance process of the CBR system being built. Inreca II showed the applicability of this CBR methodology to a variety of application tasks. These applications leverage the project in the sense that they will enable to apply an initial methodology, to make it grow and finally validate it. The project also resulted in a set of tools for building integrated case-based reasoning applications. The tools represent a significant commercial opportunity for the industrial partners of the project. Furthermore, Inreca II enhanced current CBR technology in the areas of solution adaptation.

Induction and Reasoning from Cases (1993-1996)

The ESPRIT project INRECA offers tools and methods for developing, validating, and maintaining decision support systems. Inreca's basic technologies are inductive and case-based reasoning. Induction extracts decision knowledge from case databases. It brings to light patterns among cases and helps monitoring trends over time. Case-based reasoning relates the engineer's current problem to past experiences. Inreca fully integrates both techniques within one environment and uses the respective advantages of both technologies. Inreca offers hypermedia interfaces and graphic browsers. Its object-oriented representation language CASUEL allows the definition of complex case structures and relations. The descriptive model editor is used to interactively define classes, objects, attributes, and relations. The case manager uses this information to build automatically a questionnaire for collecting cases. The questionnaire can be customized and hypermedia entities - such as sound, drawings, pictures, and videos - may be integrated.

Computer Assisted Planning

The CAPlan project started in 1991 with the motivation to examine the applicability of analogical reasoning and learning techniques, such as case-based reasoning and explanation-based learning, in the domain of process planning. Over the years, research concentrated on generative action planning based on SNLP and a case-based planner as an extension of this base level system.