Interactive Knowledge Stack (IKS)

Public EU Deliverable of the IKS project - This report provides an evaluation of the impact that IKS and its related projects had on the CMS community. Impact metrics have been selected from online analytics tools (i.e. website visits, unique visitors, page views, page views per visit, average visit duration, bounce rate and percentage of new visits) as well as EU assessment guidelines, feedback from the third EU review meeting and Information Systems research (i.e. technology impact, business impact, research impact, educational impact, impact on CMS community, sustainability of project results and on going activities beyond 2012, benefits of semantic-enhanced CMS). Data used for this impact evaluation was taken from online access to websites relevant to IKS and the IKS Impact Assessment Survey 2012 conducted at the end of 2012. Results indicate that IKS and its related projects have generated almost 360 000 page views over the course of the last six months in 2012. This together with the graduation of Apache Stanbol from its incubator status in 2012 can be interpreted as a remarkable impact of the project. Moreover, results of the IKS Impact Assessment Survey 2012 indicate that the combination of semantic technologies and CMS are able to provide several benefits such that semantic-enhanced CMS are recommended to a high degree. Additionally, technological impact, business impact and educational impact of IKS results are rated at a notable degree, too. All in all, it can be therefore concluded that IKS was a successful EU project.

Confidential Deliverable - The objective of this deliverable is to provide requirements for the development of knowledge-based interaction with Content Management Systems (CMS) and to identify interaction patterns for the communication between users and systems as well as between system components on different devices. Furthermore, we present a formal description of a model of content-oriented interaction. In order to consolidate the requirements, we had brainstorming discussions with the industrial partners to refine requirements that were extracted beforehand from selected publications and reports. Furthermore, studies from standardization consortia, active in the field of semantic interaction have been taken into account.

Confidential Deliverable - The objective of this deliverable is to describe the results of the exercise which is executed to benchmark the industrial software capabilities as one aspect of the requirements capturing process for the Interactive Knowledge Stack. The theoretical foundation and the underlying model which are used for the benchmarking approach have been designed in (Kowatsch et al. 2009, IKS D1.1 Design of the Semantic Benchmark Experiment). Combining business-driven requirements and technical aspects the benchmark model provides a two-fold approach addressing IT executives of CMS providers and customers on the one hand and CMS developers and architects on the other hand. The experiment includes interviews and development tasks ("semantic challenges") to evaluate business needs and technological capabilities.

Research on ubiquitous information systems (UIS) has recently gained attention in the IS community. But dedicated empirical instruments that are robust and capture individual characteristics of UIS are still missing. A rather new empirical construct derived from Task-Technology Fit theory was proposed and denoted as Situation-Service Fit (SSF). This paper shows how SSF can be used within the Situational Design Method for IS, a design method tailored to UIS. For this purpose, the SSF instrument is first tested for face validity as well as discriminant and convergent validity. Then, SSF is evaluated as a predictor variable of behavioral intentions to use services that are embedded in UIS. Hereby, also discriminant validity of SSF with regard to perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use is assessed. For this purpose, data from a four-year EU project is used, which includes a pretest and three empirical user studies. Results show that SSF can be a significant predictor of service usage. However, validity issues still exist and thus, further research on the SSF instrument is recommended.

Sales talks between customers and sales personnel are efficient and preferred means for exchanging information that is relevant for purchase decisions on non-commodity products. Dialogs used in sales talks are governed by complex and in many respects conflicting intentions on both sides. While previous Decision Support Systems (DSS) are designed by the principle of congruent intentions of communication partners, we present an approach that extends this by congruent and opposing intentions of communication partners. We use a design methodology for dialog-based purchase DSS that use Natural Language Technologies (NLT) for dynamically creating question-answer-based sales dialogs. It is first shown how dialog schemata are obtained by a field study and evaluated by subjects. In the second part, these schemata are integrated in a Natural Language Technology-enhanced Mobile Sales Assistant (NLT-MSA). The role of NLT-MSA is to take the position of a sales person with the task to balance congruent and conflicting intentions during sales dialogs. Results of a lab experiment (n=54) are discussed by which the use of a NLT-MSA prototype in sales situations were tested. As part of this study, test persons rated application domains for NLT-MSA that will guide future field experiments in the large

Confidential Deliverable - Deliverable 1.3 of the IKS Project is a non-public report describing in some detail, the results of the following research activities: 1. An empirical study concerning perceived business needs in relation with content management. This study generated more than 170 individual statements of needs and was based on a survey done with two populations: (a) senior executives from CMS technology providers and (b) senior executives from CMS user organisations. 2. The detailed qualitative analysis of an experiment in which six CMS technology providers had been asked to 3. (a) develop prototype solutions for seven "semantically rich" CMS tasks and where they were subsequently asked to (b) provide a self assessment of their current ability to provide the above semantically rich services to customers. A detailed comparison of 12 high level business needs as perceived by: (a) CMS technology providers (based on the above empirical study) (b) CMS customer organisations (based on the above empirical study) (c) CMS intermediaries and consultants (using their benchmarking criteria) (d) Researchers into CMS and Semantic technologies (based on the semantically rich CMS tasks and their implicit rating of technical difficulty). The tangible outcomes of the work presented here are the 170+ business needs, ranked and prioritized according to stakeholder's opinions and aggregated into 12 high level requirements. In addition, the document provides a basis for aligning and harmonising various exist- ing benchmarking methods and criteria lists for assessing CMS technology. By linking benchmark criteria to business needs, the report makes an important contribution to the field of IT Alignment, specifically for advanced content management applications.

Restricted Deliverable - The objective of this deliverable is to provide requirements for the development of interactive knowledge-supported ambient environments. In order to identify these requirements, we have developed and applied a new design methodology that is grounded in Information Systems design science research. Therefore, we first identified business needs for an ambient bath environment together with an industrial partner before we evaluated them empirically with the help of mock-ups. In addition, we adopted a bottom up approach to review existing technical architectures for ambient environments based upon which we are able to provide a preliminary architecture. As a result from both approaches, we suggest business and technical requirements for the development and evaluation of the AMI application, which are the next steps within this project (see Tasks 4.1 and 6.1).

Restricted Deliverable - This Deliverable is an interim report about the validation for the so-called "Alpha Stack" which is the first of three evolution steps of the IKS Reference Implementation.

Public EU Deliverable of the IKS project - On this report, results of IKS Task 6.2 "Validation of IKS through industrial use case application developers" are reported. The overall objective of this task is described in the Description of Work (p. 76) as follows: "To produce a robust and scalable architecture, the reference implementation of the Interactive Knowledge Stack will be tested through large scale real life field studies. In order to guarantee that an industry-strength Semantic CMS Stack is created, the IKS components will be tested and validated through industrial use case applications. The use cases will be selected among the ones which can be operated by knowledge workers with clear organizational needs and goals but without sophisticated knowledge of advanced formalisms or technologies."

Public Deliverable - The objective of this deliverable is to design a benchmark model for Content Management Systems (CMSs) in order to identify relevant requirements for the Interactive Knowledge Stack (IKS). The IKS will be a layered set of software components and specifications with the goal to improve the interaction with knowledge objects of CMSs by using Semantic Web technologies. In contrast to projects that benchmarked rather technical aspects of CMSs, we propose a model that evaluates CMSs consistently from the business perspective down to the technology layer. This approach is based on IT alignment theory that states that higher degrees of fit between business needs and IT result in increased business performance. Accordingly, IT executives of organizations that provide CMSs and IT executives of organizations that use CMSs as well as CMS developers are taken into account covering both business and technical aspects. The deliverable is structured as follows. First, we introduce the IKS project and pose relevant research questions that the IKS benchmark model for CMSs must address. Then, related work on CMS benchmarks, semantic technologies and applications is discussed from which shortcomings of exiting benchmarks are derived and implications for the design of the IKS benchmark model are drawn. Afterwards, we present the IKS benchmark model for CMSs, which describes a study-driven and experiment-driven approach to compare CMSs. Consistent with the model, questionnaire items for the study targeted at IT executives of CMS customer and provider organizations and implementation tasks for the experiment targeted at CMS developers are provided. Finally, we conclude this deliverable by a summary and an outlook on the next steps within the IKS project.