Real-time monitoring of urban dynamics, which is widely unexplored, has recently received a lot of attention due to the fast rise of inexpensive pervasive sensor technologies. Following the comprehensive vision of a “digital skin for planet Earth” by Neil Gross (1999), it can be presumed that geo-sensor web deployments will experience a considerable boost within the coming years, as pervasive sensing has recently become feasible and affordable. This enriches knowledge about our environment with uncharted real-time information layers.This book focuses on pervasive sensing in urban environments, which poses very particular challenges – as well technical and technological ones, as socio-political and privacy-related ones. The Live Geography approach presented in this book seeks to tackle these challenges with an open sensing infrastructure for urban monitoring applications. The system makes extensive use of open (geospatial) standards throughout the entire process chain – from sensor fusion to data analysis, Complex Event Processing (CEP), alerting, and finally visualisation.The thesis discusses the implemented technical infrastructure as well as how the methodology can potentially influence the city and its inhabitants by “making the abstract real”. In other words, the thesis illustrates how pervasive monitoring infrastructures can change urban social interactions and people’s short-term behaviour, and which issues are related to establishing such systems.

Nanotechnologie wird von vielen als Motor einer ‚neuen industriellen Revolution’ und als Schlüsseltechnologie des 21. Jahrhunderts betrachtet. Nicht zuletzt der ‚hype’, der ihre Entwicklung begleitet, inspiriert paradiesische bis alptraumhafte, enthusiastische bis zögerliche Visionen einer Zukunft im Zeichen der Nanotechnologie. Auch wenn Zukunftsvisionen immer technologische Entwicklungen begleitet haben, so spielen sie jetzt beim Phänomen „Nano“ eine konstitutive Rolle, indem sie sowohl seine soziale und politische Identität als auch seine Wissenschaftlichkeit bestimmen. Nanotechnologie wird durch Spekulationen und Verwischungen zwischen Realität und Fiktion inszeniert, auch was ihre möglichen ethischen Implikationen angeht. In diesem Sammelband wird der Prozess der Selbst-Fiktionalisierung der Nanotechnologie aus sozialwissenschaftlicher, ethischer, literaturwissenschaftlicher und wissenschaftstheoretischer Perspektive analysiert. Nanotechnology is considered by many as a motor of a new ‘industrial revolution’ and as a key technology of the 21st century. If nothing else but hype accompanies it, the development inspires paradisiacal and nightmarish, enthusiastic and hesitating visions of a future in the name of nanotechnology. Even if visions of the future have always accompanied technological developments, they play a constitutive role in nanotechnology, because they shape both its social and political identity as well as its scientific character. Nanotechnology is fictionalized through speculations and blurring between reality and fiction. These speculations and blurring are also applied to the ethical implications. In this book the process of self-fictionalization of nanotechnology will be disentangled from the perspective of sociology, ethics, literary-studies and epistemology.

Today, nanoscience and emerging technologies weave ever more tightly into the social fabric. Scientific and technological innovations at the infinitesimal depths of matter now entail cultural, political, and philosophical ramifications of extraordi- nary scope, extending from the molecular scale to the global scale, from the physical entanglements of subatomic particles to the fiscal entanglements of transnational markets. The need to engage these technical developments and their social aspects with fine-grained precision becomes increasingly evident. This volume addresses the question of engagement by working from the bottom up: grappling with the particular, discrete operations of nanoscience and related fields in order to assess how these operations shape, and are shaped by, practices of participatory culture and civil society. It opens outward from minimal and local interactions with the molecular sciences—attending to the necessity of quantum engagements—and expands across the dimensions of history, public discourse, ecology, and political economy. Refracting the social complexities of our high-tech world, the es-says in this collection participate in the project of articulating new modes of technoscientific governance. Bringing together contributions and perspectives from experts in the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences, Quantum Engagements showcases ongoing research activities of the vibrant, multidisciplinary community of S.NET, the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies.

Mit „Gesund alt werden. Rehabilitation maßgeschneidert.“ wird das Auftaktwerk der neuen Reihe „Reha konkret!“ veröffentlicht. Der Name wird dabei Programm sein. Wissenschaftli-che Erkenntnisse sind als solide Basis unumstritten. Dennoch werden der Bezug zur Praxis und der konkrete Nutzen für die Patienten im Blick behalten. Die vorliegende Publikation geht auf den 1. Fachkongress für Rehabilitationsforschung und Versorgungsmanagement zurück. Namhafte Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler stellten ihre neusten For-schungsarbeiten im Bereich Versorgung älterer Menschen vor. Die Veranstaltung gab struk-turellen, ökonomischen aber auch ethischen und soziologischen Themen ihren entsprechen-den Raum. Für die künftige Versorgung älter Menschen in unserem Land sind noch lange nicht alle Her-ausforderungen thematisiert worden. Vor allem müssen noch ungenutzte Potentiale in der Rehabilitation in Zukunft größere Bedeutung für die Versorgungsgestaltung erlangen. Mit „Gesund alt werden. Rehabilitation maßgeschneidert.“ wird eine Plattform dafür geschaffen.

Process model management consists of several phases within the process management life-cycle, starting with the design of processes. This requires the explicit representation of activities, temporal and hierarchical dependencies between activities, as well as the modeling of domain knowledge. These process models are initially described at a level of coarse granularity and then specialized or refined into a more specific model. Given two process models, it is a challenging task to decide whether one process model is a valid specialization of the other, more abstract model. A further aspect in process model management is the configuration of process models. A process model is adapted and configured according to individual requirements. We present novel contributions to several phases of process model management. We use Description Logics as a formalism to describe process models and their semantics. As a starting point, we present a pattern-oriented approach for expressive process modeling in Description Logics. We build upon our process model representation and apply reasoning services for process model retrieval. Process model retrieval is based on the control flow characteristics. Reasoning services are used for the validation of process model specializations. We describe existing specialization principles and their semantics in Description Logics and check the validity of process model specializations with respect to these principles. We address process model configurations by means of families of processes. Finally, process model changes are analyzed with respect to certain kinds of changes called refactorings, which only change the process model structure. We handle process model refactoring by a generic approach, which relies on comparison methods within the underlying Description Logic knowledge base.

Because of the increasing use of decentrally held data and networked services, detailed knowledge about the existing data (for example its origin, structure, formats, quality and reference applications) becomes more and more important. The availability of such metadata and the evaluation of the fitness for use based on these metadata are vital. This book intents to contribute to the development of meaningful and machine-interpretable quality descriptions of geographical information. It focuses on spatio- temporal semantic integrity constraints. Three major contributions are elaborated: (i) a detailed categorisation of semantic integrity constraints, (ii) a framework for the formal definition of the constraints and (iii) a reasoning methodology for the detection of conflicting and redundant constraints. Possible application areas are quality assurance of geodata, geodata integration and harmonisation, data modelling and ontology engineering, semantic similarity measurement and usability evaluation.Awarded with the Dissertation Price 2010 for excellent dissertations by the Association of Friends of the University of the Bundeswehr Munich (Freundeskreis der Universität der Bundeswehr München e.V.)