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Technical Report: Initial report on digitally researching the network drawings of Mark Lombardi

New NBI publication:

Robert Tolksdorf. Initial report on digitally researching the network drawings of Mark
Lombardi. Technical Report TR-B-13-03, Freie Universität Berlin, 2013. PDF.

Abstract: We do digital research on the artist Mark Lombardi (1951-2000) as an experiment in methods for digital art history. We manually generate GraphML representations of the networks depicted in his drawings and publish them at http://www.lombardinetworks.net. Services on the data are implemented like textual search on labels of nodes or an index on what persons or institutions appear in which works.

We visualize the networks with nodes linked to Wikipedia information about the actors. With calculations on the networks we generate synthetic drawings from multiple original works that overlap in actors.… [...Weiterlesen/more...]

Two NBI publications as extended abstracts at WebSci 13

NBI head Robert Tolksdorf and research assistant Markus Luczak-Rösch submitted two extended abstracts to WebSci 13. We are happy to announce that both papers have been accepted and will appear in the ACM conference proceedings.

The first work entitled „Art As A Source For Innovation In Knowledge Processing“ (Robert Tolksdorf, Markus Luczak-Rösch) will be presented as a poster at the conference.

Abstract: Artists generate specific views on the world. They are knowledge workers that develop their view on the world and visualize it in some way. We argue that processes and results of art can and should be an inspiration for innovation in knowledge modeling and processing in information systems. We exemplify this view with the artist Mark Lombardi.

The second extended abstract is entitled „Beyond Positivism in Computer Science“ (Markus Luczak-Rösch) and has been selected for a regular 20 minutes presentation.

Abstract: This extended abstract provokes a discussion about a paradigm shift in Computer Science towards a discipline that is composed of a technology-critical attitude as well as theories of computation that tolerate vagueness, non-determinism, and affective behavior which are fundamental in the socio-technical nature of the Web.… [...Weiterlesen/more...]

DigiPolis survey paper published in IJWIS Journal

The DigiPolis project here at AG NBI is developing a Self-organized Semantic Storage Service (“S4″). A survey paper written by NBI staff members Hannes Mühleisen, Tilman Walther and Prof. Robert Tolksdorf was just published in the International Journal of Web Information Systems. The publication is titled “A survey on self-organized semantic storage”, here the abstract:

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show the potential of self-organized semantic storage services. The semantic web has provided a vision of how to build the applications of the future. A software component dedicated to the storage and retrieval of semantic information is an important but generic part of these applications. Apart from mere functionality, these storage components also have to provide good performance regarding the non-functional requirements scalability, adaptability and robustness. Distributing the task of storing and querying semantic information onto multiple computers is a way of achieving this performance. However, the distribution of a task onto a set of computers connected using a communication network is not trivial. One solution is self-organized technologies, where no central entity coordinates the system’s operation.

Design/methodology/approach – Based on the available literature on large-scale semantic storage systems, the paper analyzes the underlying

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Information Technology and the Art Market

Prof. Tolksdorf authored a catalogue text for PREVIEW BERLIN – THE EMERGING ART FAIR discussing how information technology could drive innovation in the art market (deutsche Version hier).… [...Weiterlesen/more...]

DigiPolis project publication accepted at NaBIC2011 Congress

The DigiPolis project here at AG NBI is developing a Self-organized Semantic Storage Service (“S4″). A research paper written by NBI staff members Hannes Mühleisen, Tilman Walther and Prof. Robert Tolksdorf discussing self-optimization of the stored data was just accepted for the Third World Congress on Nature and Biologically Inspired Computing (NaBIC2011) in Salamanca, Spain.
The publication is titled “Data Location Optimization for a Self-Organized Distributed Storage System”, here the abstract:

Nature-inspired algorithms allow the creation of complex systems that are scalable in many dimensions, adaptable to changing conditions, and robust against failure. Our S4 system employs these algorithms to provide a distributed storage service based on swarm operations. Here, autonomous agents move on a virtual landscape of connected computers to store and retrieve data. However, these swarm-based approaches achieve their impressive performance by trading away correctness guarantees, occasionally leading to misplaced data items. In order to achieve consistent storage, there is a need for a constant optimization of the store’s data structure. In this paper, we describe a fully distributed and scalable heuristic for the optimization of the location of stored data items within a distributed storage system. We evaluate our heuristic using best- and worst-case test data

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DigiPolis project publication accepted at Web-KR3 Workshop

The DigiPolis project here at AG NBI is developing a Self-organized Semantic Storage Service (“S4″). A research paper written by NBI staff members Hannes Mühleisen, Tilman Walther and Prof. Robert Tolksdorf discussing the web-scale evaluation of range queries to support geospatial applications within this system was accepted for the 2011 International Workshop on Web-scale Knowledge Representation, Retrieval, and Reasoning (Web-KR3 2011) co-located with the 2011 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology in Lyon, France.
The publication is titled “Web-scale Range Queries in a Self-Organized Storage Service”, here the abstract:

Distributed solutions for the storage and retrieval of large amounts of data are necessary to handle the growing amounts of knowledge expected from future applications. The support for range queries provides much-needed expressivity, for example for queries on data annotated with location and time. We present a novel and scalable way for range query evaluation in our distributed storage system based on behaviour found in ants. Routing decisions in this system are taken on the basis of virtual pheromone paths leading from one node to another node, distinct for different data items. Range queries for single ranges can be evaluated by checking the pheromone paths for

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DigiPolis project publication accepted at CEC2011 conference

The DigiPolis project at AG NBI is developing a Self-organized Semantic Storage Service („S4“). A research paper written by NBI staff members Hannes Mühleisen, Tilman Walther and Prof. Robert Tolksdorf discussing the handling of different index levels within this system was just accepted for the 2011 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC2011) , New Orleans, USA.
The publication is titled „Multi-Level Indexing in a Distributed Self-Organized Storage System“, here the abstract:

In many systems providing storage and retrieval operations on data, indices are used to make these operations more efficient. Distributed storage systems provide means to distribute the burden of storing and retrieving data on multiple different computers. Routing indices can answer the central question in these systems: Where should one look for a specified data item? To be able to query for different columns in a relation or different entries in tuples, indexing for multiple dimensions is necessary. Our group applies a swarm-based approach to distributed storage leading to a new class of distributed systems, which are fully self-organized in their behavior and lack any shared global data structures. Here, we research whether multiple levels of routing indices can be maintained and used in such a

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Zwei NBI Papiere auf Kultur und Informatik Konferenz

Zwei Papiere wurden für die Konferenz Kultur und Informatik 2011 angenommen.Die Arbeit Robert Tolksdorf: IT-gestützte Innovationsmöglichkeiten für den Kunstmarkt beschäftigt sich mit der Frage wie wirkliche Innovation durch IT im Kunstmarkt entstehen und über Formen wie vipartfair.com hinausgehen kann. Joachim Quantz, Jürgen Döllner, Rolf Fricke, Robert Tolksdorf, Thomas Hoppe und Ingolf Jung: DigiPolis: Raumbezogene Visualisierung von Gebäuden im Stadtumfeld berichtet über Ergebnisse und Perspektiven der Regionalen Wachstumskern Potential Digipolis.… [...Weiterlesen/more...]

Paper accepted at SAKS 2011

The paper „Towards Swarm-based Federated Web Knowledgebases“ by Philipp Obermeier, Anne Augustin and Robert Tolksdorf has been accepted at the Workshop on Self-Organising, Adaptive, Context-Sensitive Distributed Systems (SAKS). Its abstract is

Nowadays internet knowledgebases are more and more described using ontological vocabularies. However, efficient coherent solutions for both federated storage and reasoning upon widely distributed web repositories are rarely explored.
To this end we present a self-organized, distributed storage and reasoning approach based on swarm intelligence exploiting the strong applicability of swarm algorithms to distributed environments. Our concept comprises two layers of swarm algorithms – storage and reasoning layer – for information storage and inference of new statements, respectively. We present for the former our concepts with first evaluation results and give for the latter a general swarm-based concept for forward-chaining assertional reasoning in the description logic ALC.

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DigiPolis project publication accepted at SSWS2010 workshop

The DigiPolis project at AG NBI is developing a Self-organized Semantic Storage Service („S4“). A research paper written by NBI staff members Hannes Mühleisen, Tilman Walther, Anne Augustin and Marko Harasic under the supervision of Prof. Robert Tolksdorf describing the impact of various configuration parameters on this system was just accepted for the The 6th International Workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems (SSWS2010) at the 9th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2010), Shanghai, China.
The publication is entitled „Configuring a Self-Organized Semantic Storage Service“, here the abstract:

Scalability requirements for semantic stores lead to distributed hardware-independent solutions to handle and analyze massive amounts of semantic data. We use a different approach by imitating the behaviour of swarm individuals to achieve this scalability. We have implemented our concept of a Self-organized Semantic Storage Service (S4) and present preliminary evaluation results in order to investigate to what extent the performance of a distributed and swarm-based storage system is dependent on its configuration.

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