Interoperability and security are two key topics on the EU eGovernment research agenda. They must be addressed keeping in mind that eGovernment systems will remain heterogeneous while local administrations remain in charge of their configuration and of the definition of their processes.

Project key objectives are:

1. To gather and elicit the requirements for e-Administration in the large, on basis of which a concrete interoperation of web service enabled legacy public sector applications will be achieved using collaborative workflows.
2. To provide the tools and methods for an e-Administration in the large from a technical and sociological perspective.
3. To provide the required security and privacy for an e-Administration in the large, defining the appropriate methods and tools for control, security and privacy at the collaborative workflow and application layer.

For today's businesses, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is getting a crucial task, since huge amounts of structured as well as (more and more) unstructured business data produced and consumed by business processes need to be managed efficiently. Obviously, reliability, availability and scalability are further ECM key requirements (resilience). A further requirement is the integration into an enterprise's business processes. Since enterprises are currently in the process of being transformed into more componentised business functions for improved productivity and flexibility, enterprise content manager must also be provided as services, which can be used within business processes in a utility based manner. To make ECM available in such a manner, the IT infrastructure of ECM must move from the traditional centralized system approach to a decentralized, service oriented approach, that allows the management of business data originating from geographically dispersed sources. Another prerequisite to use ECM as a service is the examination of services/grid technology in order to flexibly and dynamically adapt ECM system power to current workloads and, thereby, considerably increase overall efficiency.

In the course of the DFG founded MedPAge research project a multi agent system is designed with the objective to utilize decentralized agent-oriented methods for planning and coordination of hospital activities, and to verify the practical relevance within simulation experiments. Especially, the conceptual development and the experiments shall show, how the use of autonomous, negotiating agents can improve the management of hospital processes. The presented objective is realized in an interdisciplinary cooperation of the Distributed Systems and Information Systems Group of the University of Hamburg and of the Business Management and Business Informatics Group of the University of Mannheim (formerly Business Informatics Group of the University of Bayreuth).

The "Distributed Environment for Mobility Aware Computing" project attends to the conceptual design and development of a common infrastructure for integration and coupling of mobile devices in Nomadic Computing environments.

The DynaGrid project explores dynamic data integration in grid environments. Central aspects are the localization of data sources, the overcoming of data source heterogeneity, and query formulation as well as result formatting. The experimental implementation is based on the OGSA-DAI architecture to blend into existing standards.

A key problem of collaborative workflows is the assumption that remote tasks will be executed as agreed on before. In order to enforce compliance to given requirements, evidence of the correct execution of a remote task has to be produced. However, participants of inter-organizational workflows are autonomous and information about their private business processes is often (intentionally) unavailable to service consumers. Especially in an open environment, the enforcement of contracts and the proof of compliance to predefined requirements is a challenge.
This project attempts to elaborate an approach to enforce the correct execution of tasks which are executed remotely using supervising mechanisms. In order to cope heterogeneity, web services and service oriented architectures are the basis for further development.

Intelligent agents are a modelling paradigm, based on the notion of agents with mental states. The Jadex reasoning engine follows the Belief Desire Intention (BDI) model and facilitates easy intelligent agent construction with sound software engineering foundations. It allows for programming intelligent software agents in XML and Java and can be deployed on different kinds of middleware such as JADE.

The featurism of commercial relational database management systems makes these systems applicable for a wide variety of applications. But their administration is a complex task and causes a high total cost of ownership for database systems. Autonomic (self-managing) database systems intend to reduce administration complexity and costs by automatically reacting to changing system loads and external events.
In the SARD research project we develop and evaluate techniques, which serve as a basis of a system-wide self-management logic for autonomic relational database systems:

• Light-weight monitoring of the system state in order to detect the need for reconfiguration analysis
• Modelling of DBMS components and behaviour as a basis for reconfiguration decisions
• Definition and monitoring of business goals for autonomic databases

Many applications today need to retrieve and manage information from diverse systems and data sources, where related data is stored in quite different formats. Nowadays, enterprises often need to manage information both from XML documents stored in a native XML database system and from (object-)relational data stored in an (object-)relational database system. The idea of the SQXML project is to integrate these two information sources. The SQXML Integration System will provide the user with a global integrated schema that unifies the XML and SQL database schemas, so that the user will get an access to the entire information stored in these separate data sources. Both query languages, SQL and XQuery, will be supported in the global schema. At the same time the databases will co-exist independent from each other, preserving their autonomy. The project is aimed at investigating methods and techniques in the field of Information Integration and developing new concepts to implement the SQXML Integration System.

The TracG project investigates complex activities in grid environments. Focal points are a versatile role management of participants and a dynamic handling of control spheres to maintain transactional control while allowing for maximum flexibility in the course of both short- and long-running processes.

The dynamic composition of existing services into new services is at the core of service-oriented computing. The objective of FRESCO (Foundational Research on Service Composition) is to develop a framework that service providers can use in order to model, develop, and execute composite services. The FRESCO framework will include conceptual tools, such as models for service composition and aggregation. The framework will also include technology elements, such as an integrated development environment and specific components of the infrastructure for service execution. A methodology will be given for the use of the FRESCO framework in the development of composite service solutions.

This research project aims at investigating new concepts and mechanisms for system infrastructures which are (re- and self-) configurable at run-time, especially in the field of electronic commerce applications. The project is supported by the German Research Council (DFG).

FSNets are used as a formal basis in the analysis and design of distributed systems. Especially in the area of distributed workflow, using Feature Structures (known from AI) as tokens in Petri nets enables a higher level of abstraction in data / knowledge modelling. A special problem that is tackled is the consistency and unification of distributed copies. A tool based on the Reference Net Workshop (Renew) is currently being developed.

The COSMOS project aims to develop a support platform for business transactions across the Internet based on a generic contracting service. Potential users of such a system include small and medium enterprises and even individual persons. The contracting service enables its users to negotiate, sign, and settle electronic contracts across the Internet without leaving a uniform and flexible system environment.

Open full-text information service for computer science.

OSM (Open Service Model) is a project funded by the EU ACTS Programme. It aims to stimulate business transactions in an electronic service market environment. Therefore an electronic commerce infrastructure is to be designed, implemented, and deployed to the public. The technological framework for this activity conforms to CORBA standardisation and is implemented in Java.

The onefC project aims to build a digital identity management infrastructure to enable Internet users to reveal personal information to communication partners in a secure and controlled manner. The main goals of onefC are application and transport independence, decentralisation and privacy. Privacy in this context does not only mean to hide personal data, but rather the choice to show personal data to selected communication partners.

OSM (Open Service Model) is a project funded by the EU ACTS Programme. It aims to stimulate business transactions in an electronic service market environment. Therefore an electronic commerce infrastructure is to be designed, implemented, and deployed to the public. The technological framework for this activity conforms to CORBA standardisation and is implemented in Java.

Scone is a Java framework, especially designed to support rapid development of Web navigation tools.

Standardization efforts in E-Business data exchange, like the XML standards BMEcat or ebXML, stimulate the integration between the information systems of organisations and therefore enable valuable cost and time savings in B2B electronic commerce. The dynamic coordination of these distributed systems, using negotiation mechanisms to support and automate processes, will continue the integration on a higher level. The project Electronic Procurement Negotiations (EPN) is aimed to provide innovative solutions in this context and is specialized to the application area of E-Procurement systems for small and medium sized enterprises (SME).

The goal of the Hydepark project is to find general concepts to integrate mobile systems into distributed system environments as well as to design a framework of minimal requirements adequate for existing mobil platforms. Consequently, new mechanisms like e.g. XML or WAP, are evaluated and implemented for portable appliances. Additionally, traditional communication technologies (from SMTP to CORBA) can be accessed by developing dynamic protocol adapters.

Vesuf is a model-based User Interface Development Environment (MB-UIDE) which uses UML based models for UI Spec. An interpreter creates UIs from the models at runtime. It is possible to build different UI-modalities for one application (eg AWT, WML, ...)

Dejay is a dialect of Java that simplifies the development of distributed software applications. These often involve concurrency, distribution and persistence and require learning many different technologies like Java-Threads, Java RMI, CORBA and OODB. In Dejay you just have to learn one concept that allows concurrent execution, remote access, creation and migration of objects and simple object persistence. It is simple and cleanly object-oriented. And its free.

The basis of the Basic Research Component Development Environment is the concept of a holistic software development process, which supports design and implementation of software systems as well as updating and maintenance. Based on so-called Adaptive Software Composition, evolutionary growing software solutions can be realised. In the sense of Component Ware, building blocks of such solutions can be recombined and reconfigured within some domain to acquire new solutions.

FSNets are used as a formal basis in the analysis and design of distributed systems. Especially in the area of distributed workflow, using Feature Structures (known from AI) as tokens in Petri nets enables a higher level of abstraction in data / knowledge modelling. A special problem that is tackled is the consistency and unification of distributed copies. A tool based on the Reference Net Workshop (Renew) is currently being developed.

Renew is a Petri net editor and simulator that has been developed at TGI and is now enhanced and applied at VSYS for modelling and performing contract-driven workflow execution within the Cosmos project.