Announcements & Activity Report
January, 1st 2020
We welcome Aleksandra Revina as a new researcher at the Department of Economics. Aleksandra has been active in the BMaKE research group for a long time. As a staff member, her focus will be on supporting the study program management and the restructuring of the Master's program in Business Information Systems. Her expertise in business modeling will be of great benefit in this context.
December, 18th 2019
In the series "Applied Business Informatics" of the Springer Vieweg Verlag the anthology "Universities in Times of Digitalization - Teaching, Research and Organization" has just been released. Chapter 6 of this anthology is dedicated to the current state of research in the project "Digital Module Catalog". The authors are Vera Meister, Wenxin Hu and Philipp Pottenstein. The title of the article is: "Knowledge Graph-based Module Catalog as an Interface between Digital Teaching and Digital Campus Management".
December, 18th 2019
The last event of the year in the elective module Enterprise Knowledge Graph Implementation (EKGI) had a contemplative setting. Fruit punch was accompanied by Christmas cake and gingerbread from Saxony, homemade cookies and other treats. All three teams reported in the "Weekly Scrum" about their development work of the last week and their plans for the next working week. The teams' results will be presented to the public at the end of January.
December, 16th 2019
This year's project studies also concluded with a public presentation in the university's main auditorium. Wenxin Hu supervised a project group that dealt with the potential of knowledge graphs in the context of commercial websites. On the basis of a hotel website, the students showed methods and tools as well as the effort and benefit of semantic data markup using schema.org.
28th to 29th of November 2019
Technical University Berlin has commissioned ASIIN to accompany the accreditation process for its double-degree master's program Innovation in Information Technology. The program is at the same time an educational offer of the innovation network European Institute for Innovation and Technology (EIT) Digital, of which TU Berlin is a member. Prof. Vera Meister has been appointed as a appraiser for this procedure.
November, 26th 2019
The main speaker at this BMaKE seminar was Jonas Jetschni, a graduate of our university and currently Senior Architect at BCG Platinion. From 2014-2017, Jonas was involved in many prototypical developments within the BMaKE research group and co-author of numerous publications. He gave an inspiring presentation about a new initiative of the W3C for the specification of decentralized digital identities (DID) and its promising role as a trust layer in the Semantic Web Stack. On the occasion of the seminar, opportunities for future cooperation were explored.
21st to 22nd November 2019
In the architecturally impressive Curio-Haus Hamburg, two days were devoted to sustainability and digitalization in the academic context. As a participant in Campus Innovation 2019, Vera Meister had the opportunity to participate in talks, workshops and many personal discussions. From her point of view, the highlight was the keynote lecture by the philosopher Julian Nida-Rümelin on the topic: "Digital Humanism - Philosophical Reflection".
November, 14th 2019
Together with Carmen Reber, Wenxin Hu designed an interactive workshop within the framework of the project day "Study and Profession" at Saldern-Gymnasium Europaschule of the city of Brandenburg. With interest and commitment, the students got involved in learning about the power of business processes by means of a practical example and understood that this is not only about graphics, but also about information technology design. Finally, the students could try their hand at their own models.
November, 12th 2019
Two current and one future PhD student of the BMaKE group reported on their research status. The seminar was organized by Vera Meister and Nina Rizun. All lectures were in English:
4th to 16th of November 2019
Already for the fifth time (since 2014), the Master students of Business Information Systems had the opportunity to get to know modern methods of analyzing unstructured texts in an intensive block seminar. The main speaker of the module "Social Networks and Sentiment Analysis" (SNSA) was again Dr. Nina Rizun from the TU Gdansk. She was supported by her daughter, Maria Rizun, research assistant at the University of Economics Katowice.
November, 6th 2019
On the occasion of the defence of Wenxin Hu's master thesis, Dr. Sebastian Tramp, Chief Technology Officer of eccenca GmbH Leipzig, visited our university. This was already the third very successful cooperation within the scope of a student thesis. We were able to persuade Dr. Tramp to give a rousing lecture on the strategic orientation and current developments of eccenca Corporate Memory - a knowledge graph platform for retrievable, easily accessible, fully compatible and reusable data in the company. This was part of the Enterprise Knowledge Graph Implementation course.
October, 22nd 2019
The cooperation activities of the Alfred Nobel University and the Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences also include the joint production and use of video lectures. At the end of her stay at our university, Dr. Yuliia Bartashevska, Head of the Department of Information Technologies at the Alfred Nobel University Dnipro recorded a lecture on the introduction to web technologies. This added another language to the video platform fbwTube.
October, 22nd 2019
In the first part of the seminar Yuliia Bartashevska and Aleksandra Revina reported on their current research activities. The second part was held by Vera Meister and Marcel Cikus. They analyzed two recent papers on visualization approaches for knowledge graphs.
October, 18th 2019
In addition to teaching and research, an exchange programme also includes acquaintance with regional economy and history. This year, our guest delegation from the Alfred Nobel University visited the Optics Industry Museum in Rathenow together with Vera Meister. It was extraordinarily impressive to see how a branch of industry that has flourished for centuries can develop from the initiative of a single, curious person.
October, 15th 2019
At the beginning of this year's stay of students of the Alfred Nobel University Dnipro at our university was the traditional International Student Workshop. This year's topic was Decision Model and Notation (DMN). Six student teams presented their operational decision models and demonstrated their feasibility using the Camunda DMN simulation environment.
03.-05. October 2019
At the 6th GSOM Emerging Markets Conference, which this year was entitled Management in Digital Ages, Prof. Dr. Vera Meister presented the paper: "A Knowledge Graph for Course Modules as an efficient Information Management System for Higher Educational Institutions".
The conference comprised 12 tracks with a broad range of topics from "Enterpreneurship and Innovation in Emerging Markets" to "Information and Knowledge Management in Business Administration". The paper, written by Vera Meister and Wenxin Hu, represents an interim result of the BMaKE research project Digital Module Catalog.
2nd October 2019
The elective module "Enterprise Knowledge Graph Implementation" met with a pleasingly large interest. 14 students of the Master's programme in Business Informatics will dedicate themselves to the (further) development of knowledge graph-based prototypes. In her introductory lecture, Prof. Dr. Vera Meister presented the state of work and the development goals:
Still in October, a Design Thinking Workshop and a Mini-Hackaton with students from our partner university in Dnipro will take place to develop first spike solutions for the prototypes.
23.-25. September 2019
At the 18th International Conference on Perspectives in Business Informatics Research our research group won the best paper award for "Multi-component Infrastructure for e-Lectures - A Viable Solution for Small and Medium-Sized Organizations". Authors of this paper are Vera Meister, Wenxin Hu, Emre Arkan and Hannes Günther. Wenxin presented the paper at the conference and obviously did very well. This success is primarily due to the persistent pursuit of our innovative ideas and the high commitment and inventiveness of the young developers - not least, however, also to the generous support of our project over several years through the project "Diversity in Studies and Teaching".
15.-18. September 2019
Marcel Cikus presented the paper "Kritische Reflexion eines experimentellen didaktischen Konzepts im Modul Wirtschaftsinformatik 1 für BWL-Bachelor" (Critical Reflection of an Experimental Didactic Concept in the Module Information Systems 1 for Business Administration Bachelor) at the AKWI symposium. The authors of the paper are Marcel Cikus and Vera Meister, who systematically review their experiences with the method of problem-based learning and place them in context with other didactic methods of Information Systems in Business Studies. The guiding principle for critical reflection is formed by two competence requirements for Business Administration graduates who are derived stringently from the requirements of Digital Transformation: (1) design competence at the interface between subject matter and IT and (2) orientation in the potential design space.
In the higher education policy part of the conference Prof. Dr. Vera Meister presented the report of the AKWI spokesperson and moderated a discussion with representatives of the Hochschullehrerbund (hlb) on the topic: 12plusOne - An Initiative of hlb for the further development of universities of applied sciences.
9th September 2019
Accompanying the 15th SEMANTiCs in Karlsruhe there was the third workshop on Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG). November last year we presented our Knowledge Graph-based Wiki Seminar Papers. Since ORKG follows a broad concept of science and research, this time we presented our work on the semantic video platform fbwTube. At the same time, Prof. Vera Meister participated in a beta test of the ORKG front end and in a discussion of the most relevant challenges currently facing the ORKG project.
30. August 2019
Emre Arkan, who worked intensively on the development of the semantic video platform fbwTube for several semesters, achieved an unusually good bachelor's degree. He had worked on the topic: "Development of an Open Source Software for RDF Dataset Support in Neo4J" on behalf of eccenca GmbH. He worked very closely with the developer of NSMNTX and was able to contribute his own commits to this open source project, which aims at the use of RDF in the context of Neo4J. We congratulate Emre to this outstanding success.
27th July 2019
The last seminar in summer semester 2019 was entitled "Business model innovations based on blockchain technologies". There were three talks by students and graduates of ANUD:
The Ethereum Blockchain was used for the practical implementations. The series of seminars concluded with a joint lunch at the Trattoria del Corso in Brandenburg at Havel.
23rd July 2019
Two theses are currently being carried out in cooperation with eccenca GmbH Leipzig.
Both presented their current state of work and discussed it with experts from eccenca and Prof. Meister. Agreements were reached on the further content and organizational procedure.
02.-06. July 2019
Dr. Nina Rizun - associate professor at the TU Gdansk and at the ANU Dnipro and at the same time visiting lecturer of many years in the study program Business Information Systems Master - stayed to a short visit at BUAS. On the one hand, the visit served to prepare the elective module "Social Networks and Sentiment Analysis" in autumn 2019. On the other hand, there was place to discuss and coordinate the cooperative research activities in the field of "Business Modeling and Knowledge Engineering". Together with Aleksandra Revina, current tasks were coordinated and discussed within the framework of joint publications.
01.-02. July 2019
The motto of the 8th Didactics Forum at BUAS was "Motivating & Teaching Diverse Study Groups - Sharing Teaching Experience". The focus was again on the question of motivating teaching - both for students and teachers. Many good teaching examples from our university as well as from our international partner universities were presented, this year from Latvia, Spain and Austria. The talk by Vera Meister and Marcel Cikus on an experimental didactic approach with Problem-based Learning in the module "Business Information Systems for Business Administration Bachelor 1" was the subject of a very lively discussion.
26th of June 2019
Three contributions to the BMaKE seminar were presented in the June issue of BMaKE seminar. Emre Arkan presented a current paper on the problem of semantification of the popular graph database Neo4J. Wenxin Hu presented the state of the art in her master thesis on the topic: "A prototypical extension of a knowledge graph management software with version control and distributed collaboration through Git with Quit Store". And finally, Vera Meister reported on a recent project application for digitalization and internationalization in cooperation with Ukrainian HEI. The next seminar will take place on 27th of July. It will be dedicated to the topic Blockchain.
20th-21st of June 2019
The Harz University of Applied Sciences on the Wernigerode campus is updating its bachelor programs for Engineering & Management, Media Informatics and Business Information Systems in a process of re-accreditation. Prof. Vera Meister has been appointed by the ASIIN as an appraiser for the accreditation of this study programs.
12th of June 2019
After a few years of development and optimization at the fbwTube project, it was now presented at this year's project conference of the university. The aim was to make the video platform fbwTube more popular within the university and to attract interested parties for further content. Basically, all students from different faculties are very interested. Also first professors are willing to implement this teaching supporting method in their lectures.
4th to 11th of June 2019
After five years of intensive exchange with the Alfred Nobel University in Dnipro (Ukraine), in which students of Business Information Systems also took part, the cooperation is now to be raised to a new level. Prof. Vera Meister therefore spent just under a week in the Ukraine. The essential foundations for a new project proposal were laid in workshops and meetings.
24nd of May 2019
Based on their experiences from the Future Day at the end of March, Wenxin Hu and Marcel Cikus held a workshop on component-based app development at the Open Day using our video platform fbwTube as an example. The nice weather attracted only a few intrepid people to the laboratories, but the discussion was all the more intense.
22nd of May 2019
With a group of 12 students we took part in the 7th Leipzig Semantic Web Day. In our portfolio we had 6 posters on research prototypes and student projects from the current course "Enterprise Knowledge Engineering". Other participants of the student poster session came from the University of Anhalt and the HTWK Leipzig. The program of the conference was full of exciting contributions from research and industry projects, which made the efficiency of semantic technologies impressively experienceable. A tutorial on Jekyll-RDF, a new technology for generating static websites on the basis of knowledge graphs, was of great value to the students. In the end, the knowledge graph projects initiated by the students are to be published in this way. Last but not least, all participants can confirm this: A journey that is funny ...
15th May 2019
The May seminar had a strong focus on database technologies for semantic applications. In detail there were the following contributions:
Finally, the seminar serves to coordinate the contributions to the student poster session at the 7th Leipzig Semantic Web Day at 22.05.2019.
17th of April 2019
After a break in the lecture-free period, the BMaKE seminar was resumed on 17.04.2019. Aleksandra Revina presented the latest results of the joint research with Dr. Nina Rizun from Gdansk University of Technologies for decision support by analysis of text corpora from service desk tickets. Wenxin Hu presented her exposé on the master thesis "The extension of a knowledge graph management software with version control and distributed collaboration through git with Quit Store", which is carried out in cooperation with eccenca GmbH and the University of Leipzig.
08-09th of April 2019
The Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences on the Krefeld campus is updating its courses of study for industrial engineering and an innovative master's course in e-commerce in a process of re-accreditation. Prof. Vera Meister has been appointed by the ASIIN as an appraiser for the accreditation of this study programs.
28th of March 2019
Wenxin Hu and Marcel Cikus organized a workshop at the THB's Future Day on the topic "Beautiful and smart - is that possible? Sure, with the recipe for clever apps!" Playfully and interactively, the workshop participants were able to explore the recipe of the fbwTube app and then transfer this "rule" to other apps. It became clear that a complex app is not created on an empty sheet of paper, but contains many prefabricated ingredients. So many cooks and suppliers are needed and the whole thing has to be cleverly coordinated.
26th of March 2019
We are pleased about the great interest in our optional module Enterprise Knowledge Engineering (EKEN), which will again be offered in the summer semester. 15 students from six nations will deal with the latest findings in the field of technical modeling of organizational knowledge. Highlight of the course will be the participation in a student poster session as part of the 7th Leipzig Semantic Web Day on May 22nd.
8th of March 2019
This year there will be a student poster session at the 7th Leipzig Semantic Web Day (LSWD) on May 22nd. It is traditionally organized by AKSW of the University of Leipzig and eccenca GmbH Leipzig. In a telephone conference Dr. Michael Martin (University of Leipzig), Prof. Thomas Riechert (HTWK Leipzig) and Prof. Vera Meister agreed on the arrangement of this session. In addition to the THB and the HTWK, the University of Chemnitz and the Anhalt-Köthen University of Applied Sciences will also participate with their students, so that a good cross-section of the practice-oriented Semantic Web courses in the region will be presented.
5-7th of March 2019
During the semester break, a core team of the research group were concerned with the question of which approaches and technologies can be used to achieve visual and interactive documentation of knowledge graph schemes. The automatic tools (e.g. vowl) and services (e.g. LODE) used so far do not meet the requirements for functionality, usability and reliability. A first concept and development approaches were discussed in brainstorming sessions lasting several days.
27-28th of February 2019
As an expert with scientific qualifications, Prof. Vera Meister is involved in the accreditation of the new Bachelor's programme in Computer Science - Digital Innovation at the Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences. The procedure is carried out by the Agency for Quality Assurance and Accreditation Austria (AQAA). At the end of February the on-site inspections took place in beautiful weather in Dornbirn.
13th of February 2019
In the course of Aleksandra Revina's (TU Berlin) cooperative doctoral procedure on "Analyzing AI Applications for Process Improvement: Interplay of Human and Machine Intelligence", a first coordination meeting with Prof. Timm Teubner, head of the research group Trust in Digital Services (TDS), was organized. Ideas for scientific cooperation between the two research groups were sounded out. Electronic market platforms are the central research object of the TDS. Research is carried out to determine which influences interface and mechanism design have on the perceptions and behaviour of the actors, and how these parameters are ultimately reflected in prices and market events.
13th of February 2019
With a public final presentation of the results, the elective module "Enterprise Knowledge Graph Implementation" in the Master's programme Business Information Systems (3rd semester) was successfully completed. The 14 students worked in three teams on prototype developments in the Digital Module Catalogproject. A Jekyll-RDF-based static website for displaying and downloading module descriptions and a prototype Phyton script for parsing textual module descriptions onto the knowledge graph schema were developed. In addition, a contribution was made to research into the use of IT systems for module catalog-relevant processes at universities in Germany.
12th of February 2019
It was a great pleasure for us to welcome Hajo Reijers, Professor of Business Process Management and Analysis at the University of Utrecht, to a scientific workshop at Telekom Innovation Labs. Aleksandra Revina had met Prof. Reijers at the Doctoral Consortium at BIS where she presented her paper "Assessing Process Suitability for AI-based Automation". The travel expenses for the workshop were financed by the THB Research Fund. Aleksandra was able to gain valuable impulses for her doctorate from the collegial critical discussion. Further possibilities of future cooperation between the PhD students of our research groups as well as within the scope of funding programs were explored.
26th of January - 9th of February 2019
As a member of the Flying Faculty of the German-Kazakh University (GKU), Prof. Vera Meister opened this year the 5th semester for the students of Business Informatics and Business Management. The two weeks were characterized by intensive work in the module "Business Process Management". At the end, the students presented their own project work for modelling and analysing a process from their own professional practice. The innovative concept of the course with integration of digital media and teaching and learning processes aroused the interest of e-learning experts of the GKU as well as the university management. It was agreed to intensify the cooperation.
22nd of January 2019
The topic of the seminar was the analysis of selected doctoral theses in the field of research. Prof. Vera Meister examined structure, research questions and accompanying publications of Sebastian Tramp's doctoral thesis "Distributed Semantic Social Networks: Architecture, Protocols, Applications". Wenxin Hu was concerned with the same goal to Sebastian Hellmann's doctoral thesis "Integrating Natural Language Processing and Language Resources Using Linked Data". Both theses were submitted to the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Leipzig in 2014/15. A slightly different approach was taken by Aleksandra Revina, who compared two publications from 2015: "Five essays on Innovation Management through Venturing and Early Internationalization" by Sebastian Fischer of the TU Berlin and "Matching Events and Activities. Preprocessing Event Logs for Process Analysis" by Thomas Baier from the University of Potsdam. The first work follows the cumulative approach, the second is a monographic manuscript.
15-16th of January 2019
The RheinMain University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden is setting up a consecutive Master's programme in Business Information Systems for the winter semester 2019/20. Graduates of the Bachelor's programme in Business Information Systems and other computer science programmes will thus be offered an attractive further qualification at a high academic level with a strong focus on computer science. Prof. Vera Meister has been appointed by the ASIIN as an appraiser for the accreditation of this study programme.
11th of January 2019
THB's research group BMaKE has been cooperating with eccenca GmbH in Leipzig since the beginning of 2018. After Jan Beckert's successful bachelor procedure, this meeting was about the jointly planned research and development project Digital Module Catalog, on the one hand, and about two further final theses on the other hand: Wenxin Hu's master thesis and Emre Arkan's bachelor thesis. In addition to her master's degree, Wenxin is a research associate at the Department of Economics and the research group BMaKE. Emre has been working as a student assistant on the fbwTube development project for more than a year.
17th of December 2018
Traditionally, first-year students in the Bachelor's degree program in Business Information Systems are allowed to face the challenges of the Project Course. We teachers suggest exciting project topics. A team of seven was concerned with the analysis of knowledge graph-based information systems. Building on the insights gained, the students designed the knowledge service octopus as an information and networking tool to accompany study activities. The final presentations took place in front of a large audience in the Audimax of the university.
10-11th of December 2018
The Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences is setting up a new part-time Master's in Business Information Systems course at the Caprivi campus for the 2019/20 winter semester. The aim of the program is to train specialists and managers who recognize the potential of modern information technologies and actively implement it through digitization decisions. A particular focus of the course is project-oriented learning, which can be intensively linked to professional activities. Prof. Vera Meister has been appointed by the ZEvA as an appraiser for the accreditation of this study program.
3rd of December 2018
Within the framework of the cooperative doctoral procedure of Aleksandra Revina, the first supervisor Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Zarnekow, holder of the chair for Information and Communication Management at the TU Berlin, Prof. Dr. Vera Meister as cooperating supervisor, and the candidate met for a milestone meeting. In addition to the status of the procedure, the previous and planned publication activities in particular were discussed. The implemented research design and the bislang erzielten publications achieved so far met with unanimous approval.
22nd of November 2018
The Technical Information Library (TIB) of the University of Hannover, which has been headed by Prof. Dr. Sören Auer since July 2017, is the initiator of an Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG). The aim is to establish a digital library for semantic knowledge in science as an open, cooperative infrastructure. In the context of the 13th International Conference on Data Integration in the Life Sciences, the TIB hosted the second ORKG Workshop. Prof. Vera Meister and Wenxin Hu presented a semiautomatic population process for the semantic Wiki of the research group BMaKE. In the afternoon, the participants of the workshop worked in five different working groups. As speaker Mariia Rizun presented the results of the working group "Engaging stakeholders: Researchers, publishers, etc.". A further cooperation with the ORKG team of the TIB was agreed.
20th of November 2018
The seminar focused on Mariia Rizun's presentation on her state of research in the doctoral process at Jekyll-RDF. UE Katowice. Mariia wird in diesem kooperativen Verfahren von Mariia is supervised in this cooperative procedure by Prof. Malgorzata Pankowska and Prof. Vera Meister and spent several weeks at the THB in November 2018. The title of her lecture was: "Knowledge Modeling for Individual Higher Education Profile Formation". Further contributions in the seminar were made by Aleksandra Revina, who gave a lecture on intermediate results of text mining in service desk ticket descriptions, and Wenxin Hu, who introduced the creation of static semantic websites with Jekyll-RDF. Concluding, Prof. Vera Meister explained the concept of a development project for knowledge graph-based module catalogs.
5-28th of November 2018
Mariia Rizun's research visit focused on empirical research on the operation of information systems in a German higher education institution with the aim of designing an extended knowledge management information system that supports the recruitment process of teachers at universities. The concept is to take into account the particularities of Polish and German universities so that it can be applied effectively in both countries. A large number of students, staff and teachers at THB were interviewed personally and via an online questionnaire. The results of this research and of the previous survey at two Polish universities were presented and discussed in the BMaKE seminar. In addition, Mariia Rizun took part together with Prof. Vera Meister and Wenxin Hu in an ORKG workshop at the TIB Hannover and in activities during a teaching and research visit of a Ukrain delegation from the Alfred Nobel University Dnipro. The research visit of Mariia Rizun was financed from the internationalization budget of the Vice President for Research of the THB.
5-10th of November 2018
For the third time we received a delegation from our partner university, the Alfred Nobel University Dnipro. On the first day of their visit, the lecturers Halyna Ryshkova and Iuliia Bartashevska as well as three students of the program Economic Cybernetics took part in an international student workshop as part of the course "Selection and Adaptation of IT Services" led by Prof. Vera Meister. In the following days, students of Business Information Systems accompanied our guests to Magdeburg, where the library of the university was visited, among other things, in the most beautiful autumn weather. Further highlights of the stay were a visit to a historical museum and the university high-rise building of the TU Berlin as well as an internship in the course "Digitalization in Companies and Organizations" in the bachelor course of studies in business administration. On this day, the students defended their papers on "Digital Forms and Workflows". In the margins of the visit, the responsible persons agreed on further cooperation activities, especially in the area of e-learning and joint further development of study courses.
1st of November 2018
We are pleased to welcome Wenxin Hu, a long-standing student and scientific assistant, as a colleague. She fills this position parallel to her master's degree, which she will complete in August 2019. Wenxin has been and continues to be involved in many of the research prototypes and has in-depth knowledge of process modeling and implementation as well as technical implementation and provision of knowledge graph-based systems. In addition to her tasks in research and teaching, Ms. Hu will also support the course of studies in Business Information Systems as required.
26-27th of October 2018
The elective module Social Networks and Sentiment Analysis gives students of the Master's programme in Business Information Systems the opportunity to acquire basic skills in this highly relevant field of Big Data technologies - also in English. While Dr. Nina Rizun from the Gdansk University of Technogogy laid the theoretical foundations for this in the first part of the course, Maria Meister, co-founder of the Italian start-up ONB Analytics - Innovative Social Assessment, taught the students a series of practical applications. The students conclude the course with a small but complex analysis project, which covers all phases of such a project from the definition of the research question, the research and preprocessing of the data, the selection and application of suitable analysis methods to the presentation and defence of the results.
23rd of October 2018
The TH Brandenburg and the University of Economics Katowice (UEK) have a long-standing cooperation, among others in PrimeNetworking, an association of European and transatlantic universities and institutions, which have dedicated themselves to the development and promotion of inter-cultural and interdisciplinary education and research as a reaction to a changing global environment since 2001. Since 2011, the UEK has held an International Week every spring on the topic of Internet Communication Management. Prof. Dr. Malgorzata Pankowska, Head of the Department of Computer Science at the Faculty of Computer Science and Communication, is responsible for this. Prof. Vera Meister has been a guest lecturer at this International Week on several occasions. In 2016, the first preliminary talks were held between the Department of Computer Science of the UEK and the research group BMaKE in order to provide cooperative support for doctoral theses. Since October 2018, an agreement has been in place, which was signed by the presidents of both universities.
22nd of October 2018
Module catalogues are among the most important constituent and quality assurance documents for courses of study at universities. In addition, they meet the valid information needs of a wide range of stakeholders. In July 2018, an interdisciplinary working group for the development of a multifunctional digital module catalogue was established at the THB under the coordination of Prof. Vera Meister. Thus it was obvious to put the development of the first prototypes into the research focus of the elective module Enterprise Knowledge Graph Implementation in the Master's program Business Information Systems. As a direct introduction to the project, we held a requirements workshop with stakeholders from the course administration and quality management of the THB in the Knights' Hall of the university. In mixed teams the already determined requirements were critically questioned, analyzed, systematized and completed. As a result, four high-priority requirements were selected for prototypical development.
16th of October 2018
As an introduction to this seminar, the freshly graduated Bachelors Marcel Cikus and Jan Beckert together with their co-founder Thomas Kral had the opportunity to report on the first steps of their StartUps Holiday Weather App leavery. The main lecture was given by Dr. Nina Rizun and Aleksandra Revina. They presented the interim results of their several weeks of joint research work on "Text Data Mining in Service Desk Ticket Texts". Wenxin Hu presented the semi-automated population process for the BMaKE Wiki seminar Papers, which she had implemented, and Prof. Vera Meister gave a status report on the OntoWiki-based video platform fbwTube.
1-20th of October 2018
Since 2014 Dr. Nina Rizun has been a regular guest lecturer at THB. Thanks to her expertise, we were able to offer a compulsory elective module for the analysis of social networks in the Master's program in Business Information Systems and since this year with a further focus on semantic text analysis. In addition to her lectureship at Gdansk University of Technology, Dr. Rizun is also a member of the faculty at Alfred Nobel University Dnipro. This year she dedicated herself not only to teaching but also to an intensive research collaboration with Aleksandra Revina on the analysis of textual descriptions of a large corpus of service desk tickets. This enabled Aleksandra Revina to take a decisive step in the development of her doctorate. The teaching and research stay of Dr. Nina Rizun was financed by funds of the DAAD project Eastern Partnerships.
26th of September 2018
In September, Jan Beckert, Marcel Cikus and Henri Joel Ngaha completed their bachelor theses on knowledge engineering topics. The BMaKE seminar gave them the opportunity to present their results in a short lecture. Aleksandra Revina then reported on the status of literature analysis as part of her doctoral thesis and explained the methods she applied for systematic literature analysis. Wenxin Hu presented her thoughts on the further development of the semiautomatic population process for the BMaKE Wiki. Prof. Vera Meister concluded the seminar with the presentation of her concept for the currently starting elective module Enterprise Knowledge Graph Implementation in the Master's program Business Information Systems.
25th of September 2018
This year's conference of the Gesellschaft für Informatik e. V. dealt with the topics work 4.0, trust and protection, digital education as well as ethics and regulation at the interface between science, economy and politics under the headline "Future of work - future of computer science". In-depth discussions took place within the framework of associated workshops. Under the title , experts from universities Learning and Working in a Changing World, business and administration gathered at the University of Potsdam to discuss current developments, challenges and trends regarding IT infrastructures and organizsational forms for the university of the future. Prof. Vera Meister participated in this discussion with her talk Concept and Comparative Analysis of a Knowledge Graph-based Module Catalog.
21st of September 2018
Dr. Sabine Brendel has been working in university didactics in Germany and Switzerland for more than 15 years. She regularly offers workshops on problem-based learning for teachers at Brandenburg universities via the Network Studienqualität Brandenburg. Prof. Vera Meister used this opportunity to put her new didactic concept for the module "Digitization in Companies and Organizations" for business administration bachelor students to the test and to exchange ideas with colleagues from other universities and disciplines.
20th of September 2018
The colleagues of the two technical universities in Brandenburg combine multiple activities in university policy and university self-administration. Examples are the nomination of external members to appointment commissions or the exchange within the framework of the Hochschullehrerbund (hlb) and the Arbeitskreis Wirtschaftsinformatik an Hochschulen für angewandte Wissenschaften (AKWI). These cooperations are also good occasions to find out about best practices at the other university. As part of her research on digital module catalogues, Prof. Vera Meister talked to the Vice President for Digitisation and Quality Management of the Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau, Prof. Dr. Stefan Kubica, about their web-based system for the maintenance and presentation of module catalogues developed by the iCampus-Wildau team.
13-14th of September 2018
The Institut für Bildungs- und Wissenschaftsmanagement GmbH (IBWM) organized the second Digital Academics Summit in 2018 together with IT-Systems International GmbH and the Hochschule für Telekommunikation Leipzig as a meeting of the digital science community. The rich conference programme was rounded off by a panel discussion on the topic "Ahead into the future - Studying in 2030", moderated by Sebastian Horndasch of the Hochschulforum Digitalisierung. Participants of the podium were:
13th of September 2018
The first stage of the cooperation with eccenca GmbH Leipzig was successfully completed with the defence of Jan Beckert's bachelor thesis on "Creation of Enterprise Ontology Documentations Using Static Site Generation Tools". Further theses and the cooperation in the development of a research prototype for digital module catalogs were discussed. eccenca provides the TH Brandenburg with an academic license for its powerful data catalog solution Corporate Memory . Furthermore, a joint commitment was agreed at the next Leipzig Semantic Web Day.
9-12th of September 2018
The AKWI is the umbrella organization of the faculties or departments with German-language Business Information Systems study courses and/or study focuses at universities of applied sciences. It is organized as a department of the Gesellschaft für Informatik. AKWI's activities focus on traditional annual conventions with scientific conferences and university policy meetings at various host universities. This year's conference was hosted by HAW Hamburg. After three years as deputy speaker Prof. Dr. Vera Meister was elected speaker of the AKWI for three years. She replaces thereby Prof. Dr. Thomas Barton in the office. Prof. Dr. Martin Wolf of Aachen University of Applied Sciences, who is also the organizer of the coming annual convention, was elected deputy speaker.
28th of August 2018
In order to coordinate activities concerning digital module catalogs at the THB in an interdisciplinary manner, an informal working group has been set up. The exchange of information was organized via an internal Moodle page. Meetings take place on a case-by-case basis, e.g. in the context of presentations of the results of courses involved. The working group consists of Prof. Dr. Martin Kraska and his colleague Lisa Jakobi from the Department of Technology, Prof. Dr. Martin Schafföner from the Department of Computer Science and Media and Prof. Dr. Vera Meister from the Department of Economics. The activities of the working group were reported at the 16th ordinary meeting of the Permanent IT Commission of the TH Brandenburg.
20-21st of July 2018
The International Conference on Education Science and Social Development in summery Shanghai brought together scientists from all regions of the world, especially from Asia. Thanks to the support of the Vice President for Teaching at the TH Brandenburg, Prof. Vera Meister was able to contribute to the discussion with her approach to competence-oriented teaching. Her contribution Competency Acquisition in Applied Knowledge Engineering - An Approach based on Learning from Errors was published by Atlantis Press as an Open Access Paper within the series Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research. On the fringes of the conference, the fascinating city could be visited.
17th of July 2018
The main contribution to the seminar came from Aleksandra Revina, who presented her paper "Assessing Process Suitability for AI-based Automation - Research Idea and Design" as a contribution to the Doctoral Consortium of the International Conference on Business Information Systems (BIS). The paper was accepted and published in Springer Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP) No 339. In addition, the seminar was dedicated to planning scientific activities in the coming academic year.
2-3rd of July 2018
The motto of the seventh THB Didactics Forum was: Motivating & Teaching Diverse Study Groups - Sharing Teaching Experience. The focus was on the question of motivating teaching - both for students and teachers. Various teaching examples from our university as well as international contributions from partner universities in Sweden, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and Greece were presented and discussed. As an interesting side effect of this forum a common interest in an effective system for digital module catalogs turned out with representatives of all three departments, which led to the spontaneous formation of an informal working group.
25th of June 2018
Marcel Cikus and Jan Beckert - Bachelor Aspirants of Business Information Systems - presented the concepts of their theses for discussion. In his thesis, Marcel will deal with methods and technologies of knowledge processing and representation in the context of project management at an innovative logistics service provider. Jan Beckert plans to investigate the use of generators for static websites as tools for the documentation of organizational ontologies and to develop a prototype based on Jekyll-RDF. In further smaller contributions Aleksandra Revina, Wenxin Hu and Prof. Vera Meister reported on the respective status of their research work and planned publications. Jan Beckert and Wenxin Hu described their impressions of the 6th Leipzig Semantic Web Day, which took place on 18.06.2018.
21st of June 2018
HTW Berlin hosted this Berlin Semantic Web Meetup. The topic was the use of Semantic Web technologies in the library world. The following questions were addressed: How has the use of library catalogs and metadata in general developed in recent decades? What is linked open data, how does it relate to the Semantic Web, and what problems can it solve for libraries? What data has been made available by libraries on the Web, and to what extent? How can this data be used both by libraries themselves to improve their services and by others to develop new services? Speakers were Felix Ostrowski - a web researcher and developer - and Johann Rolschewski, staff member of the Berlin State Library. Prof. Vera Meister has been attending the Semantic Web Meetup events regularly since 2014 and has already made her own active contributions.
27th of May 2018
At most splendid weather current and former BMaKEers met for a hike around the Riewendsee near Päwesin. The goal of the hike was a late Slavic, oval castle wall at the northern end of the lake, which is described by hiking guides as well preserved. However, it was difficult to find it in the summer grass. The lake itself repeatedly invited us for a swim. Of course we discussed all kinds of technical questions on the way and made plans for future joint activities.
15th of May 2018
This seminar was dedicated to the structured analysis of four selected papers of the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW) 2016:
The metadata as well as the results of the qualitative analysis were recorded in a structured form and integrated into the BMaKE Wiki.
9th of May 2018
On the occasion of the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (KESW) in November 2017 in Szczecin, Prof. Vera Meister and Hans-Christian Brockmann, CEO of eccenca GmbH, met for the first time. There the idea arose to cooperate within the scope of final theses or research and development projects. In March 2018 Jan Beckert - student of THB - started his compulsory internship at eccenca in Leipzig. In April 2017, he accompanied Prof. Vera Meister on an exchange visit to the Alfred Nobel University in Dnipro, where he participated in a guest lecture on knowledge engineering. This topic immediately interested him and so we were able to agree on a topic for Jan's thesis that is of great interest to both partners.
22-27th of April 2018
For the fourth time Prof. Vera Meister took part in the International Week of the University of Economics Katowice. This time she gave guest lectures on the topic: Modeling and Implementation of Technical Rules with Decision Model and Notation (DMN 1.1). As part of the scientific seminar "Smart Technologies & Smart Research", which is traditionally part of the International Week, she also gave a lecture on the knowledge graph-based Wiki to support the qualitative analysis of scientific papers by members of a research group. The International Week is framed by an inspiring cultural program and lives from the manifold contacts to enthusiasts from all over the world.
17th of April 2018
In this seminar, the bachelor aspirants Marcel Cikus and Jan Beckert dealt for the first time with the structured analysis of current research papers. They chose an openly accessible, thematically interesting paper.
In other smaller contributions, Aleksandra Revina, Wenxin Hu and Prof. Vera Meister reported on the current status of their research work and planned publications.
10-14th of April 2018
Since 2014, the Alfred Nobel University Dnipro (ANUD) and the TH Brandenburg have been linked by a vital cooperation, which is financed from funds of the DAAD programme Eastern Partnerships. Since then, there has been a regular exchange of teachers and students. This year, Prof. Vera Meister was accompanied by three students from the Bachelor's programmes in Business Informatics and Computer Science. On the ANUD side, the organisation is in the hands of Dr. Iuliia Bartashevska, who is responsible for the new Computer Science course. On the one hand, the students were involved in the guest lectures on modelling and implementation of technical rules with Decision Model and Notation (DMN 1.1) as well as in joint cultural activities. On the other hand, they had the opportunity to attend local lectures and participated actively in a student scientific conference. In their free time they were accompanied by Ukrainian students so that they could get a comprehensive picture of the city and its surroundings, the host university and the educational system in Ukraine.
24-26th of March 2018
The International Conference on Knowledge and Software Engineering (ICKSE) is one of the rather small conferences. It is closely linked to the Open Access Journal of Knowledge Engineering (IJKE). For this reason, and because of the concrete technical focus on Knowledge Engineering, we were involved both as authors and as members of the Technical Program Committee. On site, the organization of the conference was not convincing. Prof. Vera Meister took over as Conference Track Chair at short notice and was allowed to select the best paper in the track and present the certificate. Our paper was published in the IJKE.
19th of March 2018
After a one-year break, the compulsory elective courses on semantic technologies will start under a new title and with a new concept. Instead of the linear teaching of the most important relevant semantic web technologies, the focus will be more on the prototypes as developed in the BMaKE research group. Since most of these knowledge graph-based systems address organizational structures and professional services, the courses were renamed:
In addition to reverse engineering in the context of the prototypes, other activating methods are used:
We are pleased about the great interest of the students and start the new semester full of energy.
3-17th of March 2018
The German-Kazakh University (GKU) in Almaty runs a number of study programmes with double degrees together with partner universities in Germany. During the first two years of study, students acquire a sound knowledge of German, so that the majority of courses from the 3rd year of study onwards are held in German by lecturers from the so-called Flying Faculty. Prof. Vera Meister has also been a member of this group since the end of 2017. She teaches Business Process Management at the DKU in the study programs Business Information Systems and Business Management. The special fascination of Almaty lies not least in the high mountains of Tian Shan which are within reach.
