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Astract: At the faculty for Informatics, TU Wien, there is a great heterogenity among students regarding their educational requirements, especially concerning prior knowledge of programming. Nevertheless, programming is an essential part of the first year curricula of CS and Business Informatics bachelor studies and it constitutes a base, a tool or content of further courses throughout the further study progress. To support prospective students in programming already prior to their start of studies, a MOOC (massive open online course) on introductory programming has been developed at the Faculty of Informatics at TU Wien. During summer 2017 it has been successfully implemented with a limited participants group of 579 prospective students and a small group of other internal and external test persons. Ongoing evaluations have already shown that the course and its implementation as a MOOC has the significant potential to serve as an additional bridging-course offer to prospective MINT students.

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Astract: Resource-Event-Agent (REA) has been applied to various engineering and business domains, with a focus on transfer activities rather than transformation activities. In the context of smart manufacturing, vertical integration of IT systems (e.g., business applications and production control systems) is a key factor. In this work, we shed light on the integration of REA concepts into production environments by investigating properties of REA transformations and aligning them with concepts from an international standard for enterprise-control system integration (ISA-95).

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Astract: IT systems' integration in manufacturing companies is currently investigated in both academia and industry. While there can be found specialized systems and standards that tackle specific, e.g., production relevant problems, little has been done in the alignment of and transformation between such industrial standards. We will present the alignment of two specialized international standards, which will foster vertical system integration through detailed mapping of related concepts: (i) the Automation Markup Language (AML) standardizes the modeling of factory shop floors on top of the XML-based Computer Aided Engineering Exchange (CAEX) data format and (ii) ISA-95 is a series of standards targeting the integration of enterprise control systems, most prominent enterprise resource planning systems and manufacturing execution systems. In order to provide higher level semantics to lower level system descriptions, we have (i) aligned elements from AML and ISA-95 in order to make explicit both overlaps and complementary concepts and (ii) defined a ruleset for referencing external ISA-95 documents/elements from AML documents. Finally, we have developed a scenario that shows the potential use case for such an entwined use of AML and ISA-95.

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Astract: Smart manufacturing requires deeply integrated IT systems in order to foster flexibility in the setup, re-arrangement and use of attached manufacturing systems. In a vertical integration scenario, IT systems of different vendors might be in use and proprietary interfaces need to defined in order to allow the exchange of relevant information from one system to another. In this paper we present a model-driven approach for vertical integration of IT systems. It is based on the application of industry standards for the representation of hierarchy level specific system properties and an alignment of their key concepts in order to provide bridging functions for the transformation between the different systems.

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Astract: "Industrie 4.0" aims at flexible production networks that require horizontal integration across companies. Evidently, any production related information exchanged in the network must be vertically forwarded to the corresponding service endpoints of the local production system. Accordingly, there is a need to align information that flows between companies and within each company. The Resource-Event-Agent (REA) business ontology describes a metamodel for internal business activities (e.g., production) and for inter-organizational exchange constellations on the enterprise resource planning (ERP) level. ISA-95 is a series of standards targeting the integration of enterprise control systems on the interface between ERP systems and manufacturing execution systems. Consequently, we align elements of REA and ISA-95 and define conversion rules for the transformation of elements from one system to the other. By interleaving the semantics of both standards, we formally strengthen the links between the services of the business level and the production level, and support multi-system adaptation in flexible production environments.

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Astract: People frequently use internet-based messaging systems to coordinate. In order to achieve that, it is sufficient for them to exchange natural language messages. The message history they generate can be seen as a shared database that can be tapped into by personal assistive systems; moreover, messaging is increasingly used for human-computer communication. However, if natural language understanding is required for such systems to function properly, the cost of developing them is high and only few market players will be able to compete. If, on the other hand, it is possible to mix machine-interpretable data with natural language conversations, assistive or conversational programs may be developed more easily. As a first important challenge, we tackle the problem of negotiating agreements and unambiguously represent what has been agreed upon in a machine-readable form. In this paper, we propose an extension of the Web of Needs, a decentralized, Linked Data based matching and messaging system, to allow conversation partners to produce a mutually agreed-upon RDF dataset.

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Astract: The level of digitalization within transport companies is much higher than the level of digitalization across organization boundaries. This fact suggests that there is room for improvement. However, this situation is not likely to change as long as there is no financial incentive for the whole sector to cooperate in establishing a shared communication infrastructure. In this paper, we present our approach for building such an infrastructure using the method of design science. The goal is an open, Web based, de-centralized network operated by transport organizations themselves. Based on expert interviews, we argue that the current situation causes frictions that our approach may help reduce, thereby providing the incentive to participate. The proposed system is described in terms of its existing technologicial base, the Web of Needs, and the extensions needed to provide the required functionality, giving an overview of the current state of implementation.

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Astract: Business documents directly exchanged between applications usually follow a certain business document standard. No matter whether these standards are traditional EDI standards or XML-based, they are very generic including all elements that may be of need to any company in this world. Before being used in a partnership, a subset of these elements has to be defined based on the business context (geopolitical region, industry, etc.). Usually the definition of these subsets-called Message Implementation Guidelines-starts from scratch, and, thus, is very time-consuming. In this paper we present an approach to explicitly assign context to the definition of Message Implementation Guidelines. This contextual information is also used to calculate a subset for to-be-developed Message Implementation Guidelines based on existing ones. The corresponding approach is supported by a prototype implementation.