Electronic Publishing
at the Department for
Theoretical Computer Science and New Applications
University of Trier, Germany

Brief Description:
 
Publishing is submitted to revolutionary changes caused by the vast development in computer- and communication technology in the Internet. New kinds of functionalities emerge around the notion of electronic publishing originating from the field of desktop-publishing, however, aiming now at a publication entirely in electronic form. The new mechanisms show a vast number of possibilities in development in well established standards like HTML, which provide an efficient organization of complex branching structures and including multi media documents. 
Activities in Research & Development:
  The research field of Electronic Publishing is marked by a strong orientation towards practical applications. The acquired know-how has been and will be implemented in the following 3 projects:
  • Live and On-Demand Teleteaching with Tele-TASK
    With the help of the new developed system tele-TASK - Teleteaching Anywhere Solution Kit - a new, drastically simplified entrance technology for on-line lectures is reached. Out of the apartment or the office each PC user with a suitable Internet connection can follow online lessons comfortably. Even an interested layman is able to access the courses. Not only content of teaching are delivered, which are presented to the students in the lecture-room by either a whiteboard or a video beamer, but simultaneously also video and audio of the lecturer. Navigation bar for accessing different parts in the recorded lecture are included. Tele-TASK supports all usual platforms, different net bandwidths, arbitrary presentation programs and needs no special software installations, configurations and no precognition of the end-users. For the first time, the system was deployed for recording, transmission and archiving of the computer science lecture .Information security in open networks. at the University of Trier in the summer semester 2002. High access numbers are expression of the perfectly problem-free and easy possibilities of using.

  • Publication of the Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity - ECCC. 
    The Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity combines the advantages of preprint servers (in particular, fast publication) and electronic journals (especially editorial selection according to qualitative points of view) at hand of the research field of Computational Complexity.  All tasks involved in the reviewing and publication process are supported by a software system developed at our department and can be adapted to the publishing process of any other electronic journal.  Since 1994 ECCC is online and more than 60 ECCC reports have been published each year.
     
  • Development and maintenance of a Research Portal Web Site : BDD-Portal.org.
    BDD-Portal.org is serving as a central attraction point that links all the researchers, conferences and workshops in the area of Research related to Binary Decision Diagrams, as well as providing access to tools and benchmarks. The site aims to be such an one-stop Portal, that provides all this information and in addition permits online evaluation of BDD-based tools.  Providing Heuristics online - OHO.
    The department's research is also including research on Binary Decision Diagrams for application in the Computer Aided Design process of vlsi circuits. To provide researchers a platform for testing and evaluating recent development in this area, OHO has been created and is constantly maintained.
       
  • Development of the STACS Electronic Submission Service. 
    After STACS'97 (Lübeck) and STACS'98 (Paris), STACS'99 was taking place in Trier and used the Electronic Submission Service, too, which receives the submissions via email and puts them at the organisators' disposal. Again, the range of applications of the software developed is not at all limited to the example chosen (STACS).
     
  • Publication of the web pages of the GI special interest group 0.1.4. The web pages of the special interest group consist mainly of a collection of current announcements - calls for papers, conference programs, open positions, links etc. - from the field of complexity theory.   
  • Preparation of Teaching materials for online access.
    The virtual university should enable students to participate at university lectures without physical presence. One important task to achieve this objective is the preparation of university teaching material for online access. Changing lecture notes from being printed to HTML is only a minor task in this process. More important are visualisations of sequences and algorithms that support the learning process of the student and enable access to the lectures over the WWW. For an example see our online lecture notes for the lecture "Technical Foundations of Electronic Publishing on the WWW".
     
People:

Publications:
Services:
  • ECCC - The Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity
  • GI - WWW Pages of the "Gesellschaft für Informatik
  • www.bdd-portal.org - The portal site for Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams and Related Research


Activities / Projects / Coops:

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