As part of a pilot project organised by SAP University Alliances and SAP Education, research assistants Dirk Peters and Andreas Solsbach have successfully passed the certification exam to become Solution Architects for ERP Integration of Business Processes.

During the 10-day block event in Hallbergmoos - organised and conducted by SAP UCC Munich - Mr Peters and Mr Solsbach, along with 18 other participants from other universities, learned how the essential integrative business processes in the areas of procurement, production, planning, project management, sales, customer service, asset management, financial accounting, human resources and analytics interact within SAP ERP. By passing the certification on the last day of the training, the participants are authorised to offer the training to students at the University of Oldenburg in the near future.

Further information will be available here on our website shortly.

In enerCOAST (BlueGreen Coastal Energy Communities), groups in England, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany are working on site-specific regional networks for the production and utilisation of bioenergy. The unifying factor is the work on a comprehensive economic model that is based on the natural site conditions and improves co-operation between energy producers and users. Among other things, established and innovative elements of biomass utilisation are being investigated. The aim is to optimise energy-autonomous and energy-efficient structures in coastal communities. The project is being led by the University of Oldenburg.

Further information can be found under Projects > enerCOAST.

Contact: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jorge Marx Gómez and Nils Giesen

External doctoral candidate Leticia Arco García(Clustering based on Differential Intermediation and its value using rough sets) and external doctoral candidate Inty Sáez Mosquera(Procedures and Architecture for Decision Support in Strategic Processes within Logistics Management) have successfully completed their doctorates in Cuba. Their supervisor was Prof Dr Jorge Marx Gómez.

We congratulate them warmly!

Christian Grünwald successfully passed his thesis defence on the topic "Conception of an integrated corporate environmental information system - case study Volkswagen AG". The examining board consisted of Prof. Dr Dr h.c. Hans-Jürgen Appelrath, Prof. Dr rer. pol. Claus Rautenstrauch, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jorge Marx Gómez and Dr Liane Haak.

• Prof. Dr Jorge Marx Gómez was invited as keynote speaker to the VI Conferencia Internacional de Ciencias Empresariales (CICE 2008) in Cuba / Cayo Santa Maria and spoke on current research topics in business informatics (including FERP and Enterprise Tomography). He was also an international member of the organising committee.

• Dr Liane Haak spoke at the III. International Symposium on Information Systems at the CICE 2008 on 16 October 2008, where she gave an invited lecture on the topic of semantic integration.

• Mr Nico Brehm successfully placed a paper on "Evaluation of concepts for the integration of UDDI registries under consideration of market aspects" at the Data Warehousing 2008 (DW2008) and presented it at the conference from 27 - 28 October 2008 in St. Gallen/Switzerland in the component and service orientation track.

As part of the DAAD projects DEEBIS-Net and BUIS to Latin America, various activities took place with our partner universities in Cuba. A delegation of German scientists from the universities of Lüneburg, Osnabrück, Magdeburg and Oldenburg as well as the FHTW Berlin travelled to Cuba to meet with scientists from Argentina and Chile as part of the BUIS Latin America project and to plan joint activities for the coming year as well as to design and coordinate the curriculum for the Master's degree course in Business Environmental Information Systems (BUIS) with the participating universities

In addition, the kick-off meeting of the new PHD-Net project DEEBIS-Net took place, which builds on the successful results of the export of the Master's programme in Business Information Systems and will establish a network between Cuban and German doctoral candidates.

Zero Emission Park is a model project in the federal government's "Experimental Housing and Urban Development Programme (ExWoSt)". It is embedded in the comprehensive activities of the "National Urban Development Policy" and is funded by the Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development (BMVBS) and the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning (BBR).

Further information can be found under Projects > Zero Emission Park.

Contact: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jorge Marx Gómez and Veronika Wolf

A new university partnership was concluded with the National University of Singapore (NUS), Institute of Systems Science. The co-operation with this top-ranked university (in 33rd place according to the Times Higher Education - QS World University Rankings 2007) forms the basis for the planned application to the DAAD for a joint research project to export the Master's degree programme in Business Environmental Information Systems to the NUS(www.nus.edu.sg).

Contact: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jorge Marx Gómez

As part of the internationalisation measures of the University of Oldenburg (Department of Information Systems I, Very Large Business Applications), the DAAD (Department 223 - Study Programmes of German Universities Abroad) has granted four doctoral scholarships for Cuban doctoral candidates in the VLBA research programme (two scholarships per partner university CUJAE Havana and Universidad Central de las Villas, Santa Clara) for a period of three years. The doctoral candidates to be funded (Dania Pérez Armayor, Ariel Racet Valdés, Roberto Perez López de Castro, Alberto Morell) are the two best graduates of each partner university in the exported Master's programme. The doctoral candidates will be supervised in a sandwich programme and will have a supervisor and mentor in their home country and one in Germany. The doctoral candidates will spend six months per year at the University of Oldenburg (Department of Information Systems I) for research purposes and conduct research in the field of "Very Large Business Applications".

Contact: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jorge Marx Gómez

The lecture-free period was used for a special course: In co-operation with the University of Osnabrück, the Carl von Ossietzky University offered the lecture "Business Intelligence - Data Warehouse" as a practical course to students in their advanced studies. This course was held as a block seminar from 22 September to 26 September 2008 in the rooms of the Department of Information Systems I - VLBA.

Current date: Written exam on Thursday 09 October 2008, 12:00 - 14:00 s.t. in lecture hall G (A7 0-030)

Contact person: Andreas Solsbach

The UNO is a network of companies and scientific institutions from the field of environmental technologies in the region around Oldenburg (Oldb.) in Lower Saxony. The network is supported by the China Desk, the Economic Development Agency and the Department of Scientific Affairs of the City of Oldenburg. From the perspective of Business Informatics I at the Carl von Ossietzky University, expertise in environmentally relevant research topics such as "Production-related Business Environmental Information Systems" (BUIS) and "Sustainability Reporting" is contributed to the network.

Contact: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jorge Marx Gómez

The Department of Information Systems I / VLBA has succeeded in concluding new research and service cooperation agreements with industrial partners. The aim of these agreements is long-term cooperation in research through targeted projects on the department's current research focus.

New partners:

• Onvice Internet & Groupware oHG
• Janz AG
• FIO Systems AG

Contact: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jorge Marx Gómez

The following contributions were successfully placed:

At the Data Warehousing 2008 (DW2008) in St. Gallen

• Brehm, N.; Haak, L.; Marx Gómez, J. : "Evaluation of concepts for the integration of UDDI registries under consideration of market aspects". In: Proceedings Data Warehousing 2008, St. Gallen / Switzerland

At the EnviroInfo2008 in Lüneburg in the workshop "ICT-based Corporate Communication and Sustainability Reporting"

• Isenmann, R.; Marx Gómez, J.; Süpke, D. (2008): "Sustainability reporting à la carte - concept and implementation of a software tool with shopping cart functionality". From: "Proceedings of 22nd International Conference on Informatics for Environmental Protection (EnviroInfo-2008)", Lüneburg
• Süpke, D.; Allam, N.; Marx Gómez, J. (2008): "Solving Environmental Management and Public Relation Issues by Combining Industrial Environmental Information Systems with Automated Environmental Reporting". In: Proceedings of 22nd International Conference on Informatics for Environmental Protection (EnviroInfo-2008), Lüneburg
• Solsbach A., Marx Gómez J. (2008): "Corporate Sustainability Reporting Towards Sustainability Network". In: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Informatics for Environmental Protection (EnviroInfo 2008), Lüneburg, Germany, Shaker Verlag, pp. 32-35

At the GI Annual Conference - Computing Science 2008 in Munich(informatik2008.de/) in the workshop "Operational Information Systems against the Background of Climate Change"

• Marx Gómez, J.; Süpke, D. (2008): "A flexible approach for web-based, personalised sustainability reporting". In: Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft für Computing Science e.V.: Computing Science 2008 Beherrschbare Systeme - dank Computing Science, Munich

Further current publications can be found under Publications or on the staff pages.

In the latest issue (August 2008, Volume 4, Number 3) of the Journal of Enterprise Architecture(www.aeajournal.org/), Nico Brehm, Tariq Mahmoud, Jorge Marx Gómez and Ammar Memari discuss an approach to the intelligent discovery of services in distributed enterprise software architectures. The article "Towards Intelligent Discovery for Enterprise Architecture Services (IDEAS)" brings together the topics of SOA, multi-agent systems, peer-to-peer networks and semantic web services in the model of an "Intelligent Discovery Component" as a proposal for future distributed systems in and between companies. The article can be viewed at the Office of Mrs Franke.

Jorge Marx Gómez' s DAAD application "Export Master's Programme in Business Informatics to Latin America" was positively evaluated and approved for the years 2008 to 2011. The project complements the export of the Master's degree programme in Business Informatics to Cuba with a further subject and expands the co-operation to include universities in Chile and Argentina.

From 30 May 2008 to 31 May 2008, the first external retreat of the Department of Information Systems / VLBA took place at Gut Ankelohe. Due to the steady growth of internal and external doctoral candidates and the associated diversity of research interests, it was time to organise a 2-day retreat away from any distractions. The regular exchange in the doctoral candidate and VLBA seminar was no longer sufficient. The aim was to bring all doctoral candidates into contact with each other, harmonise their research interests and develop joint activities.

A total of 19 participants were able to present their current research topics in English or German and then received feedback and advice on how to proceed from their supervisors and colleagues. In addition to the professional exchange, there was also plenty of opportunity for personal and cultural exchange with the entire department, which now consists of different nations, during the breaks and finally at the joint barbecue around the campfire.

The following topics were presented:

• Jan Aalmink "Enterprise Tomography - An efficient Algorithm for semi-automatic Concept Location in VLBAs"

• Nabil Allam "Automatic Categorisation of Environmentally Relevant Web Pages"

• Nico Brehm "Federated ERP systems based on web services"

• Sabine Büttner "Empirical analysis of the potential of expert systems for the management concept of benchmarking in the application context of knowledge management"

• Christian Grünwald "Conception of an integrated corporate environmental information system - case study Volkswagen AG"

• Dr Liane Haak "Doctoral studies in OL - what to do?" and "Semantic integration and now?"

• Basel Hasan "Security in information systems"

• Nils Heyer "An integrative framework for the realisation of hyperservice-based solutions using the Semantic Web"

• Tariq Mahmoud "Towards Semantic Service Oriented Architecture"

• Boris Manychev "Dynamic project management system for SMEs based on linked business processes"

• Ammar Memari "A Model for Adaptive Applications on the Semantic Web"

• Stefan Odebrecht "Development of a key figure system supporting strategic IT controlling, taking into account interaction with information management methods"

• Andreas Solsbach "Corporate communication through corporate sustainability reporting using the example of an environmental portal"

• Daniel Süpke "Dialogue-based sustainability reporting by creating bidirectional communication channels using Web 2.0 technologies"

• Safwan Sulaiman "Designed and implemented a Java application that models the Parametric and Non-Parametric Lindenmayer Systems"

Contact persons: Prof. Dr Jorge Marx Gómez and Dr Liane Haak

In conjunction with the fourth international Interoperability for Enterprise Software and Applications (I-ESA) 2008 conference, which will take place this year from 26 - 28 March in Berlin, a workshop on "Semantic Interoperability" will be organised in the context of the STASIS project. Full details of the event can be found at www.stasis-project.net/workshop.cfm (offline).

The "cerebral" sustainability reporting project group presented its results at CeBIT 2008. The software developed was presented at the joint stand of the state of Lower Saxony in Hall 9, Stand B22.

Under the direction of Prof. J. Sauer, a further seminar of the logis.net initiative was held at OFFIS on 19 February 2008. Interesting contributions from research and practice on logistics planning topics were presented.