Andreas Schmidt

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apschmidt — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 09:57:04 +0000

The blog moved to a self-hosted solution at http://blog.andreas.schmidt.name

Two Book Chapters Summarizing Context-Aware Workplace Learning Support Research

apschmidt — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 16:34:24 +0000

Recently, I have completed two book chapters that fairly comprehensively summarize the results of my research on how to support workplace learning with the notion of context awareness:

The first focuses on the ontology-based modeling and overall methodological approach. It is placed within the context of Semantic Work Environments.
Enabling Leaning on Demand in Semantic Work Environments, to appear in Rech, Decker, Ras (eds.): Emerging Technologies for Semantic Work Environments: Techniques, Methods, and Applications, IGI Publishing, 2008
The second focuses on the architectural issues related to introducing context awareness into e-learning solutions. It describes my service-oriented approach, which is based on a ontology-centered design methodology for deriving services and ensuring their coherence.
Impact of Context-Awareness on the Architecture of E-Learning Solutions, to appear in Pahl (ed.): Architecture Solutions for E-Learning Systems, IGI Publishing, 2007

Microlearning 2007 – A different type of conference

apschmidt — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 13:55:41 +0000

The last two days I was at Innsbruck for attending the Microlearning 2007 conference which deals with topics similar to our context-aware workplace learning support approach in LIP. The participants had a refreshing variety of backgrounds. The concept of conference was inspired by the unconference idea with getting rid of traditional paper presentations and having speedgeeking sessions and microcafé discussions. I presented the knowledge maturing idea and the concept of maturity awareness in a seven minute slot for eight times in a row (with changing audience of 3 to 6 people). This was quite an experience, and I liked the immediacy of contact with your audience, but the short slot made it hard to convey the idea. But most of all, it was exhausting… Nevertheless, I took a lot of inspiring ideas with me, probably much more than from other conferences. At some points, I would have liked to have more in-depth presentations in addition to the overview presentations and especially more in-depth discussions (also more critical ones).

The microlearning idea – as a gist – is a metaphor for a new form of learning that is flexible, fine-grained, integrated into everyday activities. The biggest challenge is how to retain guidance, certification etc., which are still important. The maturing idea, as far as I took from the discussions, perfectly fits to this metaphor of learning.

One critical thing about the conference concept: networking was not that easy because of short breaks in between. Still it was nice to meet some people again and to encounter some interesting new ones. But definitely, the confence was worth going to.

Technorati tags: microlearning, microlearning2007

SOPRANO State of the Art document

apschmidt — Sun, 27 May 2007 08:26:08 +0000

Within the SOPRANO project, we were working on compiling a comprehensive and interdisciplinary compilation and assessment of the state of the art in the domains relevant to creating an ambient assisted living system. It encompasses as diverse topics as Assistive Technologies, Smart Homes, Sensors, RFID, Radar Technologies, Software Architectures, Ontologies, and Context Modeling and Management. I was mainly contributing to the sections on ontologies and context modeling & management. The document is available from here.

Professional Knowledge Management Conference (WM 2007) at Potsdam

apschmidt — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 09:00:37 +0000

The last three days I was at the Professional Knowledge Management conference at Potsdam where the knowledge management community in the broad sense met. The FZI team (Simone Braun, Hansjörg Happel, Max Völkel and me) was very busy with five presentations, two poster presentations, and one organized workshop (ProKW – Productive Knowledge Work - together with Klaus North, Stefan Güldenberg and Tobias Ley).

The ProKW workshop was an interesting combination of the management perspective on knowledge work and the techological perspective. The implications of the characteristics, as it turned out, are currently hardly reflected. This leads to a situation – according to Klaus North – where only 2% of the potential of knowledge workers is actually made use of. In the technological track, which Tobias and I chaired, there were several interesting contributions, e.g. on a generalized notion of document (call knowledge models) from Max Völkel which enables informal exchange at a much earlier phase by lowering the barriers of exchange. Simone presented our approach to vocabulary or ontology engineering, and Andreas Rath from the Know-Center presented an approach to automatically capture the context of a learner.

Apart from that, it is interesting to see how our idea of maturing spreads. On the one side, we presented (as in a previous post) three papers on the model itself and applications to software engineering and ontology engineering. On the other side, Dr. Hofer-Alfeiss presented the Siemens approach to maturing support with “breeding strategies”.

There was also an interesting insight in the workshop on Convergence of E-Learning and Knowledge Management: whereas three years ago, I felt quite alone with my integration ideas, it is now commonsense although the concrete combination with mutual enrichment is still not clear.

Last but not least, the WM was again a good place for networking and interesting talks in the breaks – with people from very different background. However, the conference programme was a little bit too crowded and breaks were often too short.

OnToContent 2007 Workshop with HR Track

apschmidt — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 17:37:26 +0000

After contributing to the workshop in 2006, I am this year co-chair of the OnToContent 2007 workshop together with Mustafa Jarrar, Claude Ostyn and Werner Ceuters. The workshop will take place at the OTM 2007 conferences at the Algarve in Portugal in the week of Nov 25-29, 2007.

The workshop focuses on ontology content, i.e. on making use of the notion of ontology in real-world applications, especially in the areas of human resources (which includes staffing, development, competence management, learning technologies among others) and e-health. The workshop is organized by the Ontology Outreach Advisory and contributes to its mission of promoting the use of ontologies in enterprises.

Abstract submission deadline is July 14, the full paper is expected until July 22.

Ontology Maturing @ WWW 2007 Workshop CKC07, Banff

apschmidt — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:28:07 +0000

For the WWW 2007 Workshop on Collaborative Construction of Structured Knowledge, we have submitted a fairly comprehensive overview of our current ontology maturing research – and got accepted. The paper combines our activities in the EU project IMAGINATION on so-called Imagenotions and our social bookmarking tool SOBOLEO (developed with in the project Im Wissensnetz), which will also be evaluated and presented as a demo at the same workshop.

LearnTec 2007

apschmidt — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 17:07:19 +0000

The past three days I was at the LearnTec fair and congress in Karlsruhe. The location changed from the heart of the city to the new Karlsruhe fair facilities outside Karlsruhe. Apparently, the number of exhibitors at the fair has shrunk.

There was a clear trend aways from traditional e-learning towards more informal and collaborative forms of learning. The keynotes of Götz Werner and Martin Eppler (on visualization) were inspiring as was Hermann Maurer from Graz. The different sessions at the congress have embraced Web 2.0 and discussed the topics from different viewpoints.

Some insights for me:

Finally, the disciplines of e-learning and knowledge management are approaching one another. Gabi Reinmann clearly pointed out, however, that we should not easily sweep away the differences of the environmental context (in formal educational settings vs. at the workplace). Although this was quite controversial in the discussion, I think that this is an important contribution. Also the model for personal knowledge management integrating KM and e-Learning is a concise conceptualization.
Klaus Tochtermann presented the APOSDLE approach about work-integrated learning which is further developing and realizing ideas that can be seen as a continuation of what we tried to achieve within the LIP project.
With the advent of social software, the constructivist pedagogy really gains ground in practice. Several examples on the use of Wikis and Weblogs were shown. It has also become clear, however, that we students and employees need to be educated on how to learn with such tools and within such settings: we need people with competencies to develop their competencies in interaction with others.
In the future, we need to have a closer look at the findings of cognitive science. There were some interesting ideas by Hanna Risku, but also phenomena like “flow” and other motivational issues have come up here and there: we need intrinsically motivated learners and workers everywhere.
There were also some interesting talks with practitioners from companies: there really is the need for maturing pathways that bring together bottom-up and top-down approaches (as we postulated within out knowledge maturing research).

Contributing to an HR Roadmap

apschmidt — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 09:25:39 +0000

Following a meeting at the OntoContent workshop at the OTM Federated Conferences in Montpellier, Christine Kunzmann and I were invited by Mustafa Jarrar to contribute to a roadmapping initiative on the application potential of ontologies and semantic technologies in the HR domain. This initiative is part of the Ontology Outreach Authority of which I have become a founding member. It is an interesting compilation of the state-of-the-art in the domain and identifies several open challenges. The roadmap document is still in draft state, but you can have a look.

SOPRANO IP-Kickoff at Sheffield, UK

apschmidt — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 20:54:17 +0000

From Jan 30 to Feb 2 I was at the kick-off meeting of the SOPRANO project, an Integrated Project funded by the European Commission under the eInclusion initiative consisting of 22 partners. It aims at an ambient assisted living solution that assists elderly people in sustaining an independent living. Within the project, we are responsible for context-aware service orchestration.

Ontology Outreach Advisory Founded

apschmidt — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 20:51:44 +0000

The Ontology Outreach Advisory was officially founded today. It is non-profit organization with the purpose of fostering the application of ontologies in “the real world”. It has grown out of the KnowledgeWeb Network of Excellence. The inaugural executive council consists of Robert Meersman, Theo Mensen and Mustafa Jarrar; first meeting will be in Innbruck beginning of June.

As a founding member I will primarily contribute to the HR chapter, promoting the ontology developments and ontology-based techniques in the HR domain.

Further exploring the concept of Knowledge Maturing: publications at WM 2007

apschmidt — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 21:30:47 +0000

The upcoming Professional Knowledge Management conference WM 2007 at Potsdam will provide the possibility to get a closer look at our ongoing research around the theme of knowledge maturing, which represents a macroscopical phase model for describing interindividual learning processes. The following three publication deal with the issue from different perspective

The first publication (together with Ronald Maier from the University of Halle-Wittenberg) combines the phase model with an organizational learning model and develops criteria for describing the different phases.Ronald Maier, Andreas Schmidt:
Characterizing Knowledge Maturing: A Conceptual Process Model for Integrating E-Learning and Knowledge Management
In: 4th Conference Professional Knowledge Management: Experiences and Visions (WM 07), Workshop on Convergence of Knowledge Management and E-Learning (CKME ’07), Potsdam, March 2007. PDF
The second publication, originating from our Wissensnetz project, transfers the idea of knowledge maturing, understood as maturing of knowledge structures in the human mind and corresponding information artifacts, to the level of vocabulary and terminology, i.e., into ontology maturing. This transfer provides interesting insights into real-world ontology-engineering, bridging the tagging and the formal ontology paradigms. Our publication presents a light-weight ontology editor reflecting these ideas in knowledge work processes, but this is only a result at the very beginning.Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt, Valentin Zacharias:
Ontology Maturing with Lightweight Collaborative Ontology Editing Tools
In: 4th Conference Professional Knowledge Management: Experiences and Visions (WM 07), Workshop on Productive Knowledge Work (ProKW 07), Potsdam, March 2007, PDF
The third publication, together with Hans-Jörg Happel from FZI, transfers the idea to software components to software engineering in order to provide new insights into software reuse processes. If we understand these reuse processes as learning processes, this provides the bridge between knowledge management/organizational learning and software engineering practice.Hans-Jörg Happel, Andreas Schmidt:
Knowledge Maturing as a Process Model for Describing Software Reuse
In: 4th Conference Professional Knowledge Management: Experiences and Visions (WM 07), Workshop on Learning Software Organizations (LSO 2007), Potsdam, March 2007, PDF

It will be interesting to explore further where the maturing concept can provide new insights and how the different application areas can cross-fertilize one another. If you have further ideas, please send them. I will be happy to collaborate on that issue!

Study Group Competencies

apschmidt — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 13:42:51 +0000

Learning support activities are increasingly recognizing the importance of competencies as abstractions of human capabilities and behavior. This covers traditional human resource development and training, vocational training and even school education, but also e-learning and competence management. There are many interesting approaches that have shown the feasibility of competency-oriented methods, several large research projects investigate competency-related issues (like APOSDLE and TENcompetence), and our research has provided also some insight into the relationship of organizational and individual competencies and how they can be exploited. But before we can deal with competencies efficiently on a large scale, many open issues need to be resolved, culminating in competency-related standards. The Study Group Competencies has established itself as an international special interest group with people like Claude Ostyn, Wayne Hodgins, Eric Duval, Luk Vervenne among several others. I have participated in the first conference call, and my first impression is that although there is still a very long way to go towards a shared understanding of competencies and their usage, such initiatives are important to bring people together – beyond traditional European research projects. Next conference call is scheduled for mid-January.

Workshop on Educational Portals in Tübingen

apschmidt — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 20:34:31 +0000

The Knowledge Media Research Center organized a workshop on educational portals (Workshop Bildungsportale) where I was invited as a panelist for the closing panel on educational portals and Web 2.0 together with Reinhard Keil (Uni Paderborn), Klaus Birkenbihl (W3C) and others. Although the focus was more on portals for schools and universities, it turned out to be a very interesting event on the changing role of portals in Web 2.0. Especially, our view that grassroot Web 2.0 approaches (characterized by blogging and tagging) and more top-down Semantic Web approaches do not contradict, but rather complement one another although it is not clear how both of them fit together. Also the trend towards portals as service providers (instead of information providers) was common sense among the panelists.

Interesting approaches were presented (among others) by Benjamin Birkenhage (ZEIT online), Richard Heinen (Lehrer-Online), Stephan Mosel (Bildungsblog), Thomas Sporer (University of Augsburg, Knowledgebay) and Stefanie Panke (IWM-KMRC, e-teaching.org).

There will be a book about the workshop which will be published next year where a digest of the different views will be collected. Stay tuned.

Symposium on Competence Management, Potsdam

apschmidt — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 12:45:15 +0000

Right after the ECTEL conference I went to the Symposium on Competence Management (Fachtagung Kompetenzmanagement) at Potsdam on October 5 – together with Christine Kunzmann. We presented our concepts and experiences with systematic human resource development and the relationship to competency-oriented workplace learning support (see our ECTEL contribution).
Although the number of participants was lower than expected, there were some interesting presentations and discussions.

The knowledge balance (Wissensbilanz) for incorporating intangible assets into the corporate financial balance sheet provided some interesting, although also highly debatable perspective for individually-centered competence management.
There was a debate on whether competence management is a part of or rather a next generation knowledge management. I took the position that competencies are a better abstraction and metaphor than knowledge is because competence acquisition and development is always seen as a complex activity while knowledge storage, transfer and acquisition is often oversimplified.

1st European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (ECTEL 06)

apschmidt — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 12:35:17 +0000

The conference took place October 1-4 near Heraklion (Crete) and was primarily organized by the PROLEARN Network of Excellence. The conference had about 200 participants and was just right in size to allow for efficient community fostering.
Workplace learning was rather underrepresented with few exceptions like the contributions from within the PRO-LC cluster projects (e.g. APODSLE presentations by the Know-Center, Graz) – and our presentations on context-aware support for workplace learning. The old separation into academic or formal business training vs. work-integrated learning at the borderline of elearning and knowledge management have not been overcome, although now the importance of these fine-grained, on-demand activities are now increasingly acknowledged as important developments in the field – which definitely is a progress compared to the situation when we started our research activities in the Learning in Process project.

There were other interesting observations at the conference:

Researchers are becoming increasingly convinced that collaboration with others in the same field is not a threat (because of competition), but rather a win-win situation to have more research impact. And this was not only because of FP7 starting soon
Impact was also an important issue for future research. It was acknowledged that Europe is very strong in research, but does not manage to transfer these research results into industrial practice.
The term learning is increasingly questioned because it does not always evoke positive associations. At the conference, competence development was a very popular term – although I think that this would mean also a shift in granularity.

Ontology-based User Context Management: The Challenges of Dynamics and Imperfection

apschmidt — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 11:00:09 +0000

Andreas Schmidt:
Ontology-based User Context Management: The Challenges of Dynamics and Imperfection
In: Proceedings of International Conference on Ontologies, Databases and Applications of SEmantics (ODBASE 2006), On the Move Federated Conferences (OTM), Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 4275, 2006, pp. 995-1011
PDF
Abstract: Robust and scalable user context management is the key enabler for the emerging context- and situation-aware applications, and ontology-based approaches have shown their usefulness for capturing especially context information on a high level of abstraction. But so far the problem has not been approached as a data management problem, which is key to scalability and robustness. The specific challenges lie in the imperfection of high-level context information, its time-dependence and the variability in the dynamics between its different elements. The approach presented in this paper presents a layered data model which structures the problems and is geared towards flexible and efficient query processing in combination of relational database and logic-based techniques. The techniques have been successfully applied for context-aware corporate learning support.

Socially-Aware Informal Learning Support: Potentials and Challenges of the Social Dimension

apschmidt — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 08:00:43 +0000

Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt:
Socially-Aware Informal Learning Support: Potentials and Challenges of the Social Dimension
In: Proceedings of the Joint International Workshop on Professional Learning, Competence Development and Knowledge Management, in conjunction with the First European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (ECTEL 06), Heraklion, 2006
PDF
Abstract: With increasingly conceiving learning as a social activity, technological support must become more aware of the social context of the individual in order to be able to provide adequate support. But many issues related to making systems socially aware are subject to ongoing research, e.g., the description of social relationship, mining social relationships, and especially privacy preservation. This paper wants to give a brief overview which possibilities social awareness can offer, and to present a research agenda for realizing these potentials.

Context-Aware Workplace Learning Support: Concept, Experiences, and Remaining Challenges

apschmidt — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 08:00:40 +0000

Andreas Schmidt, Simone Braun:
Context-Aware Workplace Learning Support: Concept, Experiences, and Remaining Challenges
In: Innovative Approaches for Learning and Knowledge Sharing. Proceedings of the First European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 06), Heraklion, Crete, October 2006, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4227, pp. 518-524
PDF
Abstract: Workplace learning offers the unique possibility of the immediacy of purpose and real-world context. In order to leverage on this, we have developed a context-aware method to support workplace learning. In this paper, we want to describe the concept of context-steered learning, both from a content-driven and communication-driven perspective, and present corresponding system functionality primitives.

AGENT-DYSL Kick-Off Meeting in Athens

apschmidt — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 13:19:17 +0000

Right after the I-KNOW conference, I attended the Kick-Off meeting of the AGENT-DYSL project, which is about Accommodative Intelligent Educational Environments for Dyslexic Learners and is funded by the European Commission within the eInclusion call (where AGENT-DYSL was ranked no. 1). The project is concerned with the development of new technologies and tools for the support of pupils with dyslexia (5-10% of all pupils suffer from dyslexia). Existing reading assistance software solutions lack important adaptive functions. The projects aims to integrate state-of-the-art technologies from the Semantic Web, speech and image processing in order to support user modeling (covering learning progress and emotional state) and adaptive user interfaces.

Our role in the project is the user context modeling and management as well as knowledge representation (especially for adaptation rules).

I-KNOW 2006

apschmidt — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 13:07:18 +0000

It was the third time I participated at the I-KNOW conference, and it was again an ideal place for networking and community building. Especially the Special Track on Integrating Working and Learning in Business (where we also presented a contribution on informal learning) was worth attending. There were interesting discussions on conceptualizing the field around the three activities working, learning and collaborating.

Interesting keynotes were given by Ronald Maier (on corporate knowledge portals) and Hermann Maurer (on the unpredictability of the future).

Towards a Human Resource Development Ontology for Combining Competence Management and Technology-Enhanced Workplace Learning

apschmidt — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 10:54:22 +0000

Andreas Schmidt, Christine Kunzmann:
Towards a Human Resource Development Ontology for Combining Competence Management and Technology-Enhanced Workplace Learning
In: Proceedings of OntoContent 2006 (in conjunction with OTM Federated Conferences 2006), Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), vol. 4278, 2006, pp. 1078-1087
PDF
Abstract: Competencies as abstractions of work-relevant human behaviour have emerged as a promising concept for making human skills, knowledge and abilities manageable and addressable. On the organizational level, competence management uses competencies for integrating the goal-oriented shaping of human assets into management practice. On the operational and technical level, technologyenhanced workplace learning uses competencies for fostering learning activities of individual employees. It should be obvious that these two perspectives belong together, but in practice, a common conceptualization of the domain is needed. In this paper, we want to present such a reference ontology that builds on existing approaches and experiences from two case studies.

Ontology-based Competence Management for Healthcare Training Planning: A Case Study

apschmidt — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 11:11:54 +0000

Christine Kunzmann, Andreas Schmidt:
Ontology-based Competence Management for Healthcare Training Planning: A Case Study
In: Proceedings of I-KNOW 2006, Graz, September 2006, Special Issue of the Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS), ISSN 0948-695X, pp. 143-150
PDF
Abstract: With the increased pressure towards economic efficiency, hospitals and other healthcare institutions need to reengineer their internal organization and processes. This challenges human resources development with increased efficiency of training in general. We have developed a competence management concept for training planning at a big German hospital with a special focus on critically analyzing the suitability of state-of-the-art ontology-based approaches for the area of nursery. Experiences from the case study show the general feasibility, but also crucial issues summarized in this paper.

Productive Knowledge Work (ProKW) Workshop @ Professional Knowledge Management (WM 2007)

apschmidt — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 11:20:07 +0000

Knowledge work is one of the main drivers of productivity for the knowledge society. Knowledge work, on an abstract level, includes a wide variety of activities that are concerned with information processing, thinking, and decision-making. Activities such as structuring of information and knowledge, articulation of new thoughts, and sharing with colleagues create knowledge and value. With the increasing importance of knowledge work, we are currently realizing that (1) we insufficiently understand the anatomy of knowledge work, (2) our current management approaches cannot deal with knowledge workers adequately and (3) knowledge work badly needs technology support, but methods and tools for technology-enhanced knowledge work are only in their infancy.

In a joint effort, the projects APOSDLE, Im Wissensnetz and NEPOMUK have organized an interdisciplinary workshop on knowledge work from economical, methodological and technological perspectives. The workshop will take place at the Professional Knowledge Management conference (WM 2007) at Potsdam.

Link