Freie Universität Berlin

The working group "Networked Information Systems" operates STI Berlin. It is led by Prof. Dr. Robert Tolksdorf and currently comprises of eleven researchers as well as student employees.

Research of the group looks at the study, development, implementation and application of languages, models and systems that facilitate the integration of information and activities in networked systems; applications of these technologies in real business environments and the study of further use cases considering the added value generated by them; and novel models for the coordination of agent societies at a huge cale, especially those models based on self-organization.

In particular, a recently funded Corporate Semantic Web group – alone consisting of a junior professor, 6 researchers and 4 students – will focus on developing semantic technologies in the areas of search, collaboration and ontology engineering for industry uptake.

The group currently runs several projects on Semantic Web technologies such as "TREMA" (IBB) on using semantic Web technologies in a system for trend prediction, Corporate Semantic Web (BMBF) mentioned above and TripCom (EU STREP) where Triple Space Computing is being brought to maturity and the group is leading two workpackages. FUB was a member of the Network of Excellence KnowledgeWeb (EU), where it was Industry Area co-manager, as well as a number of nationally funded Semantic Web projects. The group has also carried out several internal research efforts including SwarmLinda (tuplespaces + self-organization), Semantic Web Spaces (tuplespaces + Semantic Web) and ONTOCOM, a cost model for ontology development.

Finally, the group is centrally active in the annual organisation of Germany's principle conference on XML and increasingly Semantic Web technologies, now named XInnovations in 2008 (www.xinnovations.de).