Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation

The 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) was held on November 2-6, 2015 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. There were 327 delegates from 22 countries. The program included 12 long papers, 15 short papers, 33 posters, 3 demos, 6 workshops, 3 tutorials and 5 panels, as well as several interactive sessions and a Digital Preservation Showcase

Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation

The 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) was held on November 2-6, 2015 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. There were 327 delegates from 22 countries. The program included 12 long papers, 15 short papers, 33 posters, 3 demos, 6 workshops, 3 tutorials and 5 panels, as well as several interactive sessions and a Digital Preservation Showcase

A two-stage framework for designing visual analytics systems to augment organizational analytical processes

A perennially interesting research topic in the field of visual analytics is how to effectively develop systems that support organizational knowledge worker’s decision-making and reasoning processes. The primary objective of a visual analytic system is to facilitate analytical reasoning and discovery of insights through interactive visual interfaces. It also enables the transfer of capability and expertise from where it resides to where it is needed–across individuals, and organizations as necessary. The problem is, however, most domain analytical practices generally vary from organizations to organizations. This leads to the diversified design of visual analytics systems in incorporating domain analytical processes, making it difficult to generalize the success from one domain to another. Exacerbating this problem is the dearth of general models of analytical workflows available to enable such timely and effective designs. To alleviate these problems, this dissertation presents a two-stage framework for informing the design of a visual analytics system. This two-stage design framework builds upon and extends current practices pertaining to analytical workflow and focuses, in particular, on investigating its effect on the design of visual analytics systems for organizational environments. It aims to empower organizations with more systematic and purposeful information analyses through modeling the domain users’ reasoning processes. The first stage in this framework is an Observation and Designing stage, in which a visual analytic system is designed and implemented to abstract and encapsulate general organizational analytical processes, through extensive collaboration with domain users. The second stage is the User-centric Refinement stage, which aims at interactively enriching and refining the already encapsulated domain analysis process based on understanding user’s intentions through analyzing their task behavior. To implement this framework in the process of designing a visual analytics system, this dissertation proposes four general design recommendations that, when followed, empower such systems to bring the users closer to the center of their analytical processes. This dissertation makes three primary contributions: first, it presents a general characterization of the analytical workflow in organizational environments. This characterization fills in the blank of the current lack of such an analytical model and further represents a set of domain analytical tasks that are commonly applicable to various organizations. Secondly, this dissertation describes a two-stage framework for facilitating the domain users’ workflows through integrating their analytical models into interactive visual analytics systems. Finally, this dissertation presents recommendations and suggestions on enriching and refining domain analysis through capturing and analyzing knowledge workers’ analysis processes. To exemplify the generalizability of these design recommendations, this dissertation presents three visual analytics systems that are developed following the proposed recommendations, including Taste for Xerox Corporation, OpsVis for Microsoft, and IRSV for the U.S. Department of Transportation. All of these systems are deployed to domain knowledge workers and are adopted for their analytical practices. Extensive empirical evaluations are further conducted to demonstrate efficacy of these systems in facilitating domain analytical processes

Developing a GIS-integrated Tool to Obtain Citizens’ Input in On-site Participation—Learnings from Participatory Urban Planning of a Large City

Informal participation procedures are used by authorities to obtain citizen input and to ease formal plan approval procedures and decision-making at an early stage of urban planning projects. Participation in spatial planning is no longer conceivable without geo-referenced contributions. Hence, digital tools such as geographic information systems (GIS) and multi-touch tables (MTT) are increasingly being used to complement traditional tools. These technologies offer advantages such as visual presentations based on spatial and planning data that can help to simplify and illustrate complex issues. However, the integration of GIS and MTT in on-site participation is challenging, since media disruptions and missing tool capabilities impede the collection of citizens’ input and subsequent processing. We address these challenges by eliciting requirements and prototypically developing a GIS-integrated tool that enables citizens to comment via GIS and MTT in a context-related and intuitive way using mobile devices at participatory planning events

DRIVER Technology Watch Report

This report is part of the Discovery Workpackage (WP4) and is the third report out of four deliverables. The objective of this report is to give an overview of the latest technical developments in the world of digital repositories, digital libraries and beyond, in order to serve as theoretical and practical input for the technical DRIVER developments, especially those focused on enhanced publications. This report consists of two main parts, one part focuses on interoperability standards for enhanced publications, the other part consists of three subchapters, which give a landscape picture of current and surfacing technologies and communities crucial to DRIVER. These three subchapters contain the GRID, CRIS and LTP communities and technologies. Every chapter contains a theoretical explanation, followed by case studies and the outcomes and opportunities for DRIVER in this field

Using Unified Personal Information in Workspaces

Knowledge workers (KWers) deal with personal information and use tools like, e.g., desktop workspaces to support their work. But KWer support is hindered by personal information fragmentation, i.e., applications keep a set of personal information while not interconnecting it. This thesis addresses this in the domains personal task management and meeting management by using a common unified personal information model as offered by the semantic desktop personal information management (PIM) system

Sanitizing data for analysis: Designing systems for data understanding

As organizations accumulate vast amounts of data for analysis, a significant challenge remains in fully understanding these datasets to extract accurate information and generate real-world impact. Particularly, the high dimensionality of datasets and the lack of sufficient documentation, specifically the provision of metadata, often limit the potential to exploit the full value of data via analytical methods. To address these issues, this study proposes a hybrid approach to metadata generation, that leverages both the in-depth knowledge of domain experts and the scalability of automated processes. The approach centers on two key design principles—semanticization and contextualization—to facilitate the understanding of high-dimensional datasets. A real-world case study conducted at a leading pharmaceutical company validates the effectiveness of this approach, demonstrating improved collaboration and knowledge sharing among users. By addressing the challenges in metadata generation, this research contributes significantly toward empowering organizations to make more effective, data-driven decisions

A Reference Architecture for Service Lifecycle Management – Construction and Application to Designing and Analyzing IT Support

Service-orientation and the underlying concept of service-oriented architectures are a means to successfully address the need for flexibility and interoperability of software applications, which in turn leads to improved IT support of business processes. With a growing level of diffusion, sophistication and maturity, the number of services and interdependencies is gradually rising. This increasingly requires companies to implement a systematic management of services along their entire lifecycle. Service lifecycle management (SLM), i.e., the management of services from the initiating idea to their disposal, is becoming a crucial success factor. Not surprisingly, the academic and practice communities increasingly postulate comprehensive IT support for SLM to counteract the inherent complexity. The topic is still in its infancy, with no comprehensive models available that help evaluating and designing IT support in SLM. This thesis presents a reference architecture for SLM and applies it to the evaluation and designing of SLM IT support in companies. The artifact, which largely resulted from consortium research efforts, draws from an extensive analysis of existing SLM applications, case studies, focus group discussions, bilateral interviews and existing literature. Formal procedure models and a configuration terminology allow adapting and applying the reference architecture to a company’s individual setting. Corresponding usage examples prove its applicability and demonstrate the arising benefits within various SLM IT support design and evaluation tasks. A statistical analysis of the knowledge embodied within the reference data leads to novel, highly significant findings. For example, contemporary standard applications do not yet emphasize the lifecycle concept but rather tend to focus on small parts of the lifecycle, especially on service operation. This forces user companies either into a best-of-breed or a custom-development strategy if they are to implement integrated IT support for their SLM activities. SLM software vendors and internal software development units need to undergo a paradigm shift in order to better reflect the numerous interdependencies and increasing intertwining within services’ lifecycles. The SLM architecture is a first step towards achieving this goal.:Content Overview List of Figures....................................................................................... xi List of Tables ...................................................................................... xiv List of Abbreviations.......................................................................xviii 1 Introduction .................................................................................... 1 2 Foundations ................................................................................... 13 3 Architecture Structure and Strategy Layer .............................. 57 4 Process Layer ................................................................................ 75 5 Information Systems Layer ....................................................... 103 6 Architecture Application and Extension ................................. 137 7 Results, Evaluation and Outlook .............................................. 195 Appendix ..........................................................................................203 References .......................................................................................... 463 Curriculum Vitae.............................................................................. 498 Bibliographic Data............................................................................ 49