OFFIS

About: OFFIS is a facility organization based out in Oldenburg, Germany. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Smart grid & Context (language use). The organization has 600 authors who have published 1425 publications receiving 20185 citations. The organization is also known as: Institute for Information Technology.

The LEDA Traitbase: A database of life-history traits of the Northwest European flora

Abstract: Summary 1. An international group of scientists has built an open internet data base of life-history traits of the Northwest European flora (the LEDA-Traitbase) that can be used as a data source for fundamental research on plant biodiversity and coexistence, macro-ecological patterns and plant functional responses. 2. The species-trait matrix comprises referenced information under the control of an editorial board, for ca. 3000 species of the Northwest European flora, combining existing information and additional measurements. The data base currently contains data on 26 plant traits that describe three key features of plant dynamics: persistence, regeneration and dispersal. The LEDA-Traitbase is freely available at www.leda-traitbase.org. 3. We present the structure of the data base and an overview of the trait information available. 4. Synthesis. The LEDA Traitbase is useful for large-scale analyses of functional responses of communities to environmental change, effects of community trait composition on ecosystem properties and patterns of rarity and invasiveness, as well as linkages between traits as expressions of fundamental trade-offs in plants.

Workflow mining: a survey of issues and approaches

Abstract: Many of today's information systems are driven by explicit process models. Workflow management systems, but also ERP, CRM, SCM, and B2B, are configured on the basis of a workflow model specifying the order in which tasks need to be executed. Creating a workflow design is a complicated time-consuming process and typically there are discrepancies between the actual workflow processes and the processes as perceived by the management. To support the design of workflows, we propose the use of workflow mining. Starting point for workflow mining is a so-called "workflow log" containing information about the workflow process as it is actually being executed. In this paper, we introduce the concept of workflow mining and present a common format for workflow logs. Then we discuss the most challenging problems and present some of the workflow mining approaches available today.

LSCs: Breathing Life into Message Sequence Charts

Abstract: While message sequence charts (MSCs) are widely used in industry to document the interworking of processes or objects, they are expressively weak, being based on the modest semantic notion of a partial ordering of events as defined, eg, in the ITU standard A highly expressive and rigorously defined MSC language is a must for serious, semantically meaningful tool support for use-cases and scenarios It is also a prerequisite to addressing what we regard as one of the central problems in behavioral specification of systems: relating scenario-based inter-object specification to state-machine intra-object specification This paper proposes an extension of MSCs, which we call live sequence charts (or LSCs), since our main extension deals with specifying “liveness”, ie, things that must occur In fact, LSCs allow the distinction between possible and necessary behavior both globally, on the level of an entire chart and locally, when specifying events, conditions and progress over time within a chart This makes it possible to specify forbidden scenarios, for example, and enables naturally specified structuring constructs such as subcharts, branching and iteration

Gesture recognition with a Wii controller

Abstract: In many applications today user interaction is moving away from mouse and pens and is becoming pervasive and much more physical and tangible. New emerging interaction technologies allow developing and experimenting with new interaction methods on the long way to providing intuitive human computer interaction. In this paper, we aim at recognizing gestures to interact with an application and present the design and evaluation of our sensor-based gesture recognition. As input device we employ the Wii-controller (Wiimote) which recently gained much attention world wide. We use the Wiimote's acceleration sensor independent of the gaming console for gesture recognition. The system allows the training of arbitrary gestures by users which can then be recalled for interacting with systems like photo browsing on a home TV. The developed library exploits Wii-sensor data and employs a hidden Markov model for training and recognizing user-chosen gestures. Our evaluation shows that we can already recognize gestures with a small number of training samples. In addition to the gesture recognition we also present our experiences with the Wii-controller and the implementation of the gesture recognition. The system forms the basis for our ongoing work on multimodal intuitive media browsing and are available to other researchers in the field.

Introduction to the DICOM standard

Abstract: Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) has become one of the most popular standards in medicine. In the beginning, DICOM was used for communication of image data between different systems. Actual developments of the standardisation enables increasingly more DICOM-based services for the integration of modalities and information systems (e.g. RIS, PACS). In this article a review of the historical background, the technological concept, the organizational structure and current developments is given.