Integrating Scientific Publication into an Applied Gaming Ecosystem

The European (EU)-based industry for non-leisuregames (so called Applied Games, AGs) is an emerging business. Assuch it is still fragmented and needs to achieve critical mass tocompete globally. Nevertheless, its growth potential is widelyrecognized and even suggested to exceed the growth potential ofthe leisure games market. The European project Realizing anApplied Gaming Ecosystem (RAGE) is aiming at supporting thischallenge. RAGE will help to seize these opportunities by makingavailable an interoperable set of advanced Applied Game (AG)technology assets, as well as proven practices of using such AGassets in various real-world contexts. As described in [1], RAGEwill finally provide a centralized access to a wide range of appliedgaming software modules, relevant information, knowledge andcommunity services, and related scientific documents, taxonomies,media, and educational resources within an online communityportal called the RAGE Ecosystem. Besides this, an integrationbetween the RAGE Ecosystem and relevant social networkinteraction spaces that arranges and facilitates collaboration thatunderlie Research and Development (R&D), as well as marketorientedinnovation and exploitation will be created in order tosupport community building, as well as collaborative assetexploitation of User Generated Contents (UGCs) of the RAGEEcosystem. In this paper, we will describe the integration of theScientific Publication Platform (SPP) Mendeley [2] into the RAGEEcosystem. This will allow for automating repetitive tasks,reducing errors, and speeding up time consuming tasks. On theother hand it will support information, UGC, and knowledgesharing, as well as persistency of social interaction threads withinSocial Networking Sites (SNSs) and Groupware Systems (GWSs)that are connected to the RAGE Ecosystem. The paper reviewsrelevant use cases and scenarios, as well as related authentication,access, and information integration challenges. In this way, on theone hand a qualitative evaluation regarding an optimal technicalintegration is facilitated while on the other hand designapproaches for supporting features of resulting user interfaces areinitiated

Agent-Based Interaction Management for Document-Centered Collaboration in a Digital Library Abstract

Collaborative processes can be knowledge and information intensive, especially in research-oriented environments. In the Humanities, the access to resources in a digital library is often combined with collaborative interpretation of the documents. This may involve cooperative negotiations between users, careful evaluation of available options, or discussions about the interpretation of certain information items. These collaborative activities are only inadequately supported by contemporary workflow management and groupware systems. Often, the structure of those processes can only be weakly specified in that each person involved might take situative actions in her/his own individual way. Within the COLLATE project (see www.collate.de), we have applied agent-based interaction management in order to encourage scientific discussions between film experts about the interpretation of historical documents. Dedicated collaboration agents act in the background to serve as intelligent interaction managers and mediate between the users and their discourse context.

Agent-Based User Interface Customization in a System-Mediated Collaboration Environment

Within a collaborative information environment, the system acts as a mediator between remotely located users. The user interface of such an information system has not only to provide support for the task to be performed, but also to reflect the ongoing discourse context. The MACIS Framework has been developed to support the design and implementation of collaborative, interactive information systems. Using a multi-agent approach, the whole information system, including its user interface, is decomposed in terms of various classes of cooperating agents. Since the users are also modeled as part of the multi-agent organization, interactions between all constituent agents are described in a uniform way.

D6.6 – Summary, Analysis, Road-mapping and Production of Training materials

This deliverable summarizes, validates and explains the purpose and concept behind the RAGE knowledge and innovation management platform as a self-sustainable Ecosystem, supporting innovation processes in the Applied Gaming (AG) industry. The Ecosystem portal will be developed with particular consideration of the demand and requirements of small and medium sized game developing companies, education providers and related stakeholders like AG researchers and AG end-users. The innovation potential of the new platform underlies the following factors: a huge, mostly entire collection of community specific knowledge (e.g., content like media objects, software components and best practices), a structured approach of knowledge access, search and browse, collaboration tools as well as social network analysis tools to foster efficient knowledge creation and transformation processes into marketable technology assets. The deliverable provides an overview of the current status and the remaining work to come, preceding the final version in month 48 of the RAGE project

Embedding Legacy Environments into A Grid-Based Preservation Infrastructure: Paper - iPRES 2008 - London

The SHAMAN project targets a framework integrating advances in the data grid, digital library, and persistent archival communities in order to archive a long-term preservation environment. Within the project we identified several challenges for digital preservation in the area of memory institutions, where already existing systems start to struggle with e.g. complex or many small objects. In order to overcome these, we propose a grid based framework for digital preservation. In this paper we describe the main objectives of the project SHAMAN and the identified challenges for such a heterogeneous and distributed environment. We on the one hand assess in a bottom-up approach the capabilities and interfaces of legacy systems and on the other hand derive requirements based on the project’s objectives. Our investigation is focused to the integration of storage infrastructures and distributed data management. In the end we derive a service-oriented architecture with a grid-based integration layer as an initial approach to manage the challenges

COLLATE -- A Web-Based Collaboratory for ContentBased Access to and Work with Digitized Cultural Material

Many important historic and cultural sources are fragile and scattered in various archives. so that their full knowledge and usage are severely impeded. Project COLLATE develops a distributed Web-based repository with dedicated knowledge management facilities to support users in their work with digitized cultural material. As example domain COLLATE uses historical documents referring to films of the 20ies and 30ies. The repository set up by three major European film archives comprises a large corpus of digitized film censorship documents, related articles, photos, posters and film fragments. In-depth analyses of such documents give, for example, evidence about different film versions and cuts, which can be used for reconstruction of lost or damaged films or identification of persons (actors) and film fragments of unknown origin. As a virtual knowledge and working knvironment for distributed user groups, COLLATE provides content-based access to the repository and appropriate task-based interfaces for analyzing, comparing, indexing and annotating the material. It supports the users ' individual and collaborative work with the sources, continuously integrating the derived user knowledge into the system. This growing body of metadata is exploited by the system using intelligent document processing and advanced XML-based content management and retrieval functionalities. This paper describes the conceptual approach of COLLATE, focusing on the tasks and requirements of the archives and users of the system. The functional system components are outlined and assessed, describing how various user types and related complex tasks can be supported by comfortable task-based user interfaces in a collaborative working environment

Collaborative Research and Documentation of European Film History: The COLLATE Collaboratory

Whereas various collaboratories have been established since the early 1990s in the domain of natural sciences, we find so far only few comparable efforts in the arts and humanities aside from experimental systems with very limited functionality. The COLLATE system is one of the first working collaboratories in the humanities. Based on extended user requirement studies it was developed and evaluated in real life for an application dealing with the heritage of historic European film making. The implemented system employs innovative technologies for digital information management in order to allow content-based access to the digitized document collections. It also provides a comfortable Web-based work environment for supporting distributed user groups in their collaborative, document-centered knowledge working. In this article we describe our collaboration concept and the resulting system design decisions, illustrating by some concrete examples how the current real-life users interact with the COLLATE system and their distributed collaboration team. 1 Collaboratories for the Humanities When scientists publish articles in journals like NATURE they describe specific results of their work gained from numerous experiments and detailed scientific research. They have recognized rules tha

How to incorporate collaborative discourse in cultural digital libraries

Discourse structure relations can be used to establish collaborative discourses within a cultural digital library. Ranging from factual to more interpersonal levels they describe the intended relations between data and metadata objects, especially annotations. Pragmatics aspects are covered by communicative acts, which complement the discourse structure relations and provide means for metacommunication. The resulting interrelations between the various domain objects can be employed to perform advanced context-based retrieval