Annual Report 1999 / Department for Computer Science

Selbstdarstellung des Instituts für Informatik der BTU Cottbus und Berichte der Lehrstühle für das Jahr 1999.Presentation of the Department for Computer Science of the BTU Cottbus and reports of the chairs at the department for the year 1999

Organic Design of Massively Distributed Systems: A Complex Networks Perspective

The vision of Organic Computing addresses challenges that arise in the design of future information systems that are comprised of numerous, heterogeneous, resource-constrained and error-prone components or devices. Here, the notion organic particularly highlights the idea that, in order to be manageable, such systems should exhibit self-organization, self-adaptation and self-healing characteristics similar to those of biological systems. In recent years, the principles underlying many of the interesting characteristics of natural systems have been investigated from the perspective of complex systems science, particularly using the conceptual framework of statistical physics and statistical mechanics. In this article, we review some of the interesting relations between statistical physics and networked systems and discuss applications in the engineering of organic networked computing systems with predictable, quantifiable and controllable self-* properties.Comment: 17 pages, 14 figures, preprint of submission to Informatik-Spektrum published by Springe

Value Enhancement of Strategic Supply Networks for Value Bundles through Digital Social Networks

Value bundles as customer-focused combination of physical products, services and intangible assets are getting more and more strategic offerings for companies. Using value bundles as differentiation strategy leads to a significant integration of customer processes in existing business processes on the company side and to complex processes on the supplier side. The task for the offering company to find the best suppliers suitable for the offering is challenging. Regarding especially the intangible assets of value bundles there is a need for relevant information from the potential suppliers. Digital social networks like online communities, blogs or wikis might be a place to find some of these information. With this background the question arises in which way digital social networks may influence procurement processes when dealing with value bundles. To answer this question different forms of digital social network are investigated and evaluated. The evaluation leads to recommendations how to use digital social networks for the enhancement of procurement processes for value bundles in a supply network

Inherence of Ratios for Service Identification and Evaluation

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) offer a conceptual and technical solution for many problems. However, the realizationand even more the management of a SOA often remains a very hard task. A continuous evaluation of existing services andservice candidates is necessary to implement, maintain and enhance a SOA. This is far from being trivial because of thesemantic gap between requirements and technical implementations. Model-based solutions may offer a possibility to cope withthe complexity of the necessary information, but a series of conflicts needs to be resolved especially for distributed modelingprojects. These conflicts create several difficulties when trying to generate ratios that can measure the quality of a service orservice candidate. This article presents an approach to generate ratios that are inherent to a service (candidate). Inherencemeans that the ratios are only dependent on the service and not on how the necessary information was modeled

Different Approaches to Evaluation of Information Systems

Outsourcing has been one of the most influential factors contributing to changes in information systems development in the last decade. The paper presents findings from an action research project of information systems development in an outsourcing context at a large university hospital in Denmark. The research, and general findings in the literature, indicates that the intended positive effects of outsourcing are hard to achieve without negative bi-products. Decision frameworks to guide the decision-making in this respect are evaluated based on the empirical findings. It is illustrated that the issues of flexibility and controllability are among the most important when an IT-department determines its outsourcing policies. Continuity issues are also important in understanding the relationship between buyer and seller in IS-acquisition as being more complex than in a simple market model

Overview of business models for Web 2.0 communities

A new type of communities is gaining momentum on the web and is reshaping online communication and collaboration patterns and the way how information is consumed and produced [Gros04, Kolb06]. Examples of such communities are Wikipedia, MySpace, OpenBC, YouTube, Folksonomies, numerous Weblogs and others. In literature different terms can be found to denote the emerging and growing new phenomenon: social software [Bäch06] or peer production [Scho05]. In the year 2005, Tim O'Reilly popularized the term Web 2.0 [O'Reil05]. While the first two terms can be applied also to earlier, already established forms of online communities (for an overview see [Stan02]), the term Web 2.0 is mostly applied to emphasize the differences of emerging communities compared to earlier forms of online communities, encompassing various perspectives - technology, attitude, philosophy. (...