Abstract. Disaster management software deals with supporting staff in large catastrophic incidents such as earthquakes or floods, e.g., by providing relevant information, facilitating task and resource planning, and managing communication with all involved parties. In this paper, we introduce the SoKNOS support system, which is a functional prototype for such software using semantic technologies for various purposes. Ontologies are used for creating a mutual understanding between developers and end users from different organizations. Information sources and services are annotated with ontologies for improving the provision of the right information at the right time, for connecting existing systems and databases to the SoKNOS system, and for providing an ontology-based visualization. Furthermore, the users' actions are constantly supervised, and errors are avoided by employing ontology-based consistency checking. We show how the pervasive and holistic use of semantic technologies leads to a significant improvement of both the development and the usability of disaster management software, and present some key lessons learned from employing semantic technologies in a large-scale software project.

The willingness of non-programmers to develop or modify their software depends not only on using the right interfaces and programming model but also on users making positive judgment about the balance of benefits and costs such as learning time and errors. This paper reports on a questionnaire-based survey which charts this economic dimension of End-User Development (EUD) within the area of task management. The survey explores the extent of EUD practices, gauges end user's perceptions of EUD risks, benefits and proposed supporting actions, and identifies factors which facilitate EUD practices.

No abstract

No abstract

Abstract. Ad-hoc and situational applications for personal use will gain more and more traction in the work support for knowledge workers (KWers). Personal information is a key element in these applications. Composition environments for situational applications like, e.g., Yahoo Pipes, enable endusers to compose services into an application targeting their individual problems. However, we analyze that these composition environments lack access for a KWer's personal information and require redundant development of services for common KWer activities. Addressing these issues, we present 1 an infrastructure that manages the KWer's personal information consistently and thus provides services that serve as basis for enabling end-user driven service composition for application for personal use. The infrastructure consists of two key components, a basic personal information management system to maintain a KWer's personal information cloud in a unified and integrated form and domain-specific services that offer business logic for frequently occurring activities in applications for a KWer's personal use.