Digital Public Services Projekte

Project: Berlin PC
Duration: 01.08.2013 – 31.12.2014

Standardized IT workplace

The Berlin administrative authorities have around 75,000 PC workplaces which are very complicated to maintain due to a variety of non-homogeneous regional solutions. A standardized IT workplace (BerlinPC) should help establish a modern, secure, powerful and cost-efficient software, services and system architecture. BerlinPC is the central platform for running the special applications of each department. It enables location-independent access to applications and data, reduces the number of fault-prone interfaces and the amount effort expended on IT measures, and will make it easier to automate IT operations in the future.

Project: Carneades
Duration: 01.01.2012 – 31.12.2017

The Carneades argumentation system, being developed at Fraunhofer FOKUS, is a web-based, collaborative software system for the (re-) construction, evaluation, visualization and interchange of arguments.

In a five-year R&D project, together with Prof. Douglas Walton at the University of Windsor (Canada), funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, we are working on the following five topics:

• Developing a general formalism for argumentation schemes, which allows a wide variety of schemes to be modeled in such a way as to be useful for argument construction, reconstruction and evaluation, in a well integrated way that allows the many schemes to be used together.
• Developing a language for specifying argumentation protocols for different dialogue types and extending Carneades with tools which use these specifications to support the procedural aspects of argumentation in dialogues.
• Developing a formal language for expressing procedural rules or constraints specifying which party shall be assigned a particular burden of proof for some issue, along with the applicable proof standard, in each stage of the dialogue, and to extend the Carneades argumentation software to automatically assign the specified proof burdens and standards as the dialogue proceeds.
• Modelling methods and canons of statutory interpretation as argumentation schemes, using the formal language we will develop for representing argumentation schemes.
•  Extending Carneades to provide better support for evidential reasoning, building on prior work interpreting and evaluating evidence by constructing stories and comparing their coherence.

Carneades on Github

Project: Cloudless
Duration: 01.01.2015 – 31.12.2017

The cloud computing software framework for privacy and data securityp

Cloudless is a JavaScript based technology-platform. As a software framework Cloudless is addressing typical cloud computing trends and challenges. The framework enables privacy assured administration and complete offline operation of software-as-a-service solutions. Thus Cloudless solves challenges in information security, data protection and privacy, resilience and performance of IT solutions as well as for mobile use cases. At the same time Cloudless facilitates the development of web applications by delivering basic functions like user- and identity management or database integration out of the box.

 The Cloudless technology has advantages for various industries, but is particularly relevant to the professional secrecy segment. Here, Cloudless technological innovations solve the problem, that software-as-a-service can currently not be used in legally compliant way for professional secrecy keepers like doctors, lawyers, etc.. With Cloudless, a new, safe and right-to-the-generation generation of SaaS specialist applications is emerging for professions under professional secrecy regulation.

The Cloudless technology will be offered in 2017 via a spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS.

Project: GeMo – Gemeinschaftliche Mobilität
Duration: 01.12.2011 – 31.10.2014

Shared use of electric mobility

Sharing cars instead of buying them – the concept of car-sharing already exists in many big cities. In the electro-mobile future, urban citizens will make common use of the infrastructure and a large number of vehicles. This is what scientists working at Fraunhofer Institute predict. In order to turn this vision into reality, scientists are working on the “Beyond Tomorrow Project” called “Shared use of e-mobility: vehicles, data and infrastructure“, or GeMo for short in German.

Less pollution, less noise, a better quality of life – very good reasons to focus on electricity when it comes to the topic of mobility. If the EU has its way, we will only be driving electric vehicles in all major European cities as early as 2050. A good thing to aim for, but experts go even further: citizens will be able to dispense with their own cars and share the use of electric vehicles.

GeMo is one of seven “Beyond Tomorrow Projects” in which scientists are working on finding solutions for the pressing issues of the future.

Project website

Contact:
Benjamin Dittwald, Deputy Head Open Service Engineering (OSE) at Business Unit DPS
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Nikolay Vassilev Tcholtchev, Head of Quality Engineering for Urban ICT and Quantum Computing at Business Unit SQC

Project: OCEAN – Open Cloud for Europe, JApan and beyoNd
Duration: 01.10.2012 – 30.09.2014

The fundamental goal of OCEAN is to foster the emergence of a sustainable open source cloud ecosystem and boost market innovation in Europe, by generating greater efficiency and economies of scale among collaborative research projects on open source cloud computing. OCEAN is addressing European FP7 projects funded under the Objective ICT-2011.1.2 as well as other European, European national and Japanese open cloud collaborative projects.

OCEAN is to play a pivotal role among collaborative cloud research projects, especially those that are naturally following an open source approach, to help reveal commonalities, being either potential overlapping and/or opportunities for collaboration and synergies. The OCEAN project is launched in order to provide the following results:

• Identify current collaborative projects developing open cloud components among European FP7 research projects, other European national research projects, Japanese research projects and register them together with other open cloud projects in an online Open Cloud Innovation Directory.
• Provide a relative positioning or functional mapping of these projects, in relation with key standards and reference models provided by leading standard defining organizations such as NIST, ETSI, DMTF, OGF, etc in what we call a Open Cloud Interoperability Framework and Roadmap.
• Pre-test and review software artefacts from some open cloud projects and provide online services enabling open cloud projects to build and test their software.
• Foster cooperation and integration between projects through the organization of two annual events called “Plugfests” that will provide project teams the appropriate environment to work on the integration and interoperability of their software.
• Foster collaboration between European and Japanese entities on open cloud computing, cloud interoperability and standardisation by involving them in the organised Plugfests and in discussions on the Open Cloud Interoperability Framework and Roadmap.

Contact: Dr.-Ing. Yury Glikman, Groupleader Business Unit DPS

Project: Policy Compass
Duration: 01.10.2013 – 30.06.2016

The main goal of Policy Compass is to develop a research prototype of an easy-to-use, highly visual and intuitive tool for social networks and eParticipation platforms, enabling citizens and public officials to easily create, apply, share, embed, annotate and discuss causal models, charts and graphs of historical data from trusted open data sources. The aim is to develop methods and tools that facilitate more factual, evidence-based, transparent and accountable policy evaluation and analysis. The project aims also to facilitate more objective, evidence-based and transparent policy deliberations.

 The research question the Policy Compass project will address is whether and how open public data, social media, eParticipation platforms, fuzzy cognitive maps and argumentation technology can be integrated and applied to provide better tools on the World Wide Web for constructing, sharing, visualising and debating progress metrics and causal models of policies.

The aim is to provide easy-to-use tools for both the lay public, on social networks, as well as professional policy makers, to improve the quality and transparency of the policy analysis and monitoring phases of the policy life-cycle. Policy Compass will make use of Europe’s increasing amount of public sector open and structured data resources. Policy Compass will make better use of Europe’s open public data resources and empower policy-makers and citizens (especially the younger generation) to better assess government policies in the policy analysis and monitoring phases of the policy cycle.

Contact: Dr.-Ing. Yury Glikman, Groupleader Business Unit DPS

Project: tag.check.score
Duration: 01.11.2011 – 31.10.2014

To open up the image archives of the Berlin Ethnological Museum to the public, the museum and Fraunhofer FOKUS developed the Tag.Check.Score. crowdsourcing app in the context of the Code for Europe initiative. The app is based on the idea of digital volunteer work. With the app, users can add metadata to the museum’s photos, correct existing tags and earn points doing so. The goal of Tag.Check.Score. is to develop an open-source solution that other museums, libraries and archives can also use to tackle similar challenges.

Contact: Dr. Jens Klessmann, Head of Business Unit DPS

Project: Trusted Capital Cloud
Duration: 01.01.2013 – 30.11.2014

As part of the “Capital Cloud Initiative” of the Berlin Senate Department for Economics, Technology and Research and the ICT & Digital Business Association Berlin-Brandenburg (SIBB) the PROFIT funding project “Trusted Capital Cloud (TCC)“ was conducted by the partners StoneOne AG, TU Berlin and Fraunhofer FOKUS.

The aim was to create a B2B-marketplace for trusted and proven cloud services. Therefore the marketplace provides typical chargeable services in a structured and transparent manner covering the scope of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS).

Accordingly, medium sized enterprises in the capital region have the opportunity to get an access to appropriate cloud services and to minimize their occurring evaluation effort. In addition, cloud service provider can make their services accessible to a much broader customer base.