Advertisement of an open project assistant position
Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems
EC-Group (http://www.ec.tuwien.ac.at)

Short description of the SEMAMO project, funded by the „FIT IT / Semantic Systems“ programme:

The objective of SEMAMO is to make use of the increasingly growing information available at Web-based sales and marketing channels for market research, using semi automatic analyses and semantic domain models, where the domain model guides the statistical processing flow and the statistical results feed back to the domain model. With such an intelligent integration – needing also research in the respective disciplines – SEMAMO delivers a business analysis tools far beyond current state of the art. The assumption is that the Web may serve as a “picture” of the reality and that the respective online channels map market developments in terms of product descriptions, distribution, promotions, and price developments; and all this in a very timely manner and very accurately.
SEMAMO aims at building a technological framework that allows the automatic capturing of market information from online channels and the semi-automatic analysis of these data for market research and benchmarking. To automate this process, online data harvesting, semantic domain modelling, and semantically guided (i.e., domain specific) analysis and reporting technologies are integrated. This framework will be tested in the domain of e-tourism, but can be easily transferred to other economic areas due to the underlying domain model. More specifically, SEMAMO aims at
• building a metadata model that captures the required semantics to enable the interpretation of the market data according to application needs;
• sampling of data from Web sources: this will include the learning of properties of the data sources (such as data change frequency) in order to guide the sampling process;
• developing an ontology-driven strategy for cleansing of data; and
• developing semantic annotation and analysis methods for product as well as market data.
Within the project there is a two years full position (Master of Computer Science or Business Informatics), tasks to be done:
Requirement analysis of the domain
Semantic domain modelling
Software architecture and system integration
Pilot evaluation

Start: February 2008

Contact:
Univ.Prof. Dr. Hannes Werthner
http://www.ec.tuwien.ac.at