Context-Aware Information Services
My research at FZI Research Center for Information Technologies in the department Information Process Engineering focuses on the context-aware support information seeking and learning activities by exploiting information about the user’s context. In particular, I am working on the following issues:
- How can we acquire information about the user and exploit it for improving the interaction with the system?
- How can user context information be used across different applications?
- How can we deal with the dynamic and imperfection of user context information in an adequate way?
I am exploring this partcicularly in the domain of workplace learning, and ambient-assisted living (AAL).
Workplace Learning
The main application area for my research on context-aware services lies in providing context-aware support for workplace learning – the second focus of my research. My main contributions in that area are:
- Context-steered learning as a concept for context-aware workplace learning support
- Professional Learning Ontology as a conceptualization for workplace learning combining learning micro management (like context-steered learning implementations) and macro management (like competence management and other human resource development approaches). Special focus on competence modeling.
- Knowledge maturing process as a macro model for interconnected individual learning processes in an organization – which has already been successfully applied to other domains like ontology engineering (ontology maturing process, combining lightweight Web 2.0 approaches with ontologies) and software engineering
- Collaborative approaches to competence management based on people tagging and ontology maturing.
More information on that topic can be found in my publications and on the Professional Learning website.
Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)
Ambient Assisted Living
Another application field of context-aware technologies is the support for elderly people in their own homes. Main challenges lie in the complex environment models and the modular structure of the infrastructure to enable open markets. As a result of the EU-IP SOPRANO, we have initiated an open source semantic middleware (openAAL), which forms the foundation for the FZI Living Lab.
Other areas of interest
Technical topics
- Information integration (lecturer at the University of Karlsruhe on that subject) with special focus on architectural approaches
- Databases and XML technologies (book on that subject was published by Springer, in German)
Application domains
- Healthcare (especially controlled vocabularies like ICD10, ICPM, DRG etc. for which I have been developing a successful software solution (in German).
