The aim of this thesis was to develop and to evaluate a method, which enables the utilization of traditional dialog marketing tools through the web. For this purpose, a prototype of a website with "extended real-time interaction (eEI)" capabilities has been implemented and tested. The prototype was evaluated by a methodology based on the five-dimensional "e-service quality" measure after Gwo-Guang Lee und Hsiu-Fen Lin. The Foundation of the "e-service quality" measure is the SERVQUAL-Model. A statistical analysis of the user study results showed a significant correlation between eEI and user satisfaction. Before the actual realization of eEI, the "Technology Acceptance Model" after Fred D. Davis was used to investigate currently used real-time interaction systems.

One of the main goals of the artificial intelligence community is to create machines able to reason with dynamically changing knowledge. To achieve this goal, a multitude of different problems have to be solved, of which many have been addressed in the various sub-disciplines of artificial intelligence, like automated reasoning and machine learning. The thesis at hand focuses on the automated reasoning aspects of these problems and address two of the problems which have to be overcome to reach the afore-mentioned goal, namely 1. the fact that reasoning in logical knowledge bases is intractable and 2. the fact that applying changes to formalized knowledge can easily introduce inconsistencies, which leads to unwanted results in most scenarios. To ease the intractability of logical reasoning, I suggest to adapt a technique called knowledge compilation, known from propositional logic, to description logic knowledge bases. The basic idea of this technique is to compile the given knowledge base into a normal form which allows to answer queries efficiently. This compilation step is very expensive but has to be performed only once and as soon as the result of this step is used to answer many queries, the expensive compilation step gets worthwhile. In the thesis at hand, I develop a normal form, called linkless normal form, suitable for knowledge compilation for description logic knowledge bases. From a computational point of view, the linkless normal form has very nice properties which are introduced in this thesis. For the second problem, I focus on changes occurring on the instance level of description logic knowledge bases. I introduce three change operators interesting for these knowledge bases, namely deletion and insertion of assertions as well as repair of inconsistent instance bases. These change operators are defined such that in all three cases, the resulting knowledge base is ensured to be consistent and changes performed to the knowledge base are minimal. This allows us to preserve as much of the original knowledge base as possible. Furthermore, I show how these changes can be applied by using a transformation of the knowledge base. For both issues I suggest to adapt techniques successfully used in other logics to get promising methods for description logic knowledge bases.

Die folgende Arbeit zeigt eine Möglichkeit auf, Lokalisierung eines Objektes mittels Ultraschall zu realisieren. Dazu werden drei bis fünf im Raum verteilte Sensoren genutzt, um anhand von Distanzinformationen die Position eines Objekts relativ zu den Positionen der Sensoren zu bestimmen. Eine Besonderheit besteht dabei darin, dass die Sensoren nahezu beliebig in der Ebene verteilt sein können. Ihre Anordnung wird vom System in der Kalibrierungsphase mit Unterstützung des Anwenders ermittelt. Dabei dürften ein gleichseitiges Dreieck, ein Quadrat oder Pentagramm je nach Sensoranzahl die besten Ergebnisse liefern. Um die relative Bewegung in eine Absolute zu übertragen, findet eine Umrechnung in Meter anhand der Taktung der Mikrocontroller, des Prescalers des verwendeten Timers und der Schallgeschwindigkeit statt.

The identification of experts for a specific technology or framework produces a large benefit for collaborative software projects. Hence it reduces the communication overhead that is required to identify an expert on the fly. Therefore this thesis describes a tool and approach that can be used to identify an expert that has a specific skill-set. It will mainly focus on the skills and expertise of developers that use the Django framework. By adding more rules to our framework that approach could easily be extended for different technologies or frameworks. The paper will close with a case study on an open source project.

Traditional Driver Assistance Systems (DAS) like for example Lane Departure Warning Systems or the well-known Electronic Stability Program have in common that their system and software architecture is static. This means that neither the number and topology of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) nor the presence and functionality of software modules changes after the vehicles leave the factory. However, some future DAS do face changes at runtime. This is true for example for truck and trailer DAS as their hardware components and software entities are spread over both parts of the combination. These new requirements cannot be faced by state-of-the-art approaches of automotive software systems. Instead, a different technique of designing such Distributed Driver Assistance Systems (DDAS) needs to be developed. The main contribution of this thesis is the development of a novel software and system architecture for dynamically changing DAS using the example of driving assistance for truck and trailer. This architecture has to be able to autonomously detect and handle changes within the topology. In order to do so, the system decides which degree of assistance and which types of HMI can be offered every time a trailer is connected or disconnected. Therefore an analysis of the available software and hardware components as well as a determination of possible assistance functionality and a re-configuration of the system take place. Such adaptation can be granted by the principles of Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). In this architectural style all functionality is encapsulated in self-contained units, so-called Services. These Services offer the functionality through well-defined interfaces whose behavior is described in contracts. Using these Services, large-scale applications can be built and adapted at runtime. This thesis describes the research conducted in achieving the goals described by introducing Service-oriented Architectures into the automotive domain. SOA deals with the high degree of distribution, the demand for re-usability and the heterogeneity of the needed components. It also applies automatic re-configuration in the event of a system change. Instead of adapting one of the frameworks available to this scenario, the main principles of Service-orientation are picked up and tailored. This leads to the development of the Service-oriented Driver Assistance (SODA) framework, which implements the benefits of Service-orientation while ensuring compatibility and compliance to automotive requirements, best-practices and standards. Within this thesis several state-of-the-art Service-oriented frameworks are analyzed and compared. Furthermore, the SODA framework as well as all its different aspects regarding the automotive software domain are described in detail. These aspects include a well-defined reference model that introduces and relates terms and concepts and defines an architectural blueprint. Furthermore, some of the modules of this blueprint such as the re-configuration module and the Communication Model are presented in full detail. In order to prove the compliance of the framework regarding state-of-the-art automotive software systems, a development process respecting today's best practices in automotive design procedures as well as the integration of SODA into the AUTOSAR standard are discussed. Finally, the SODA framework is used to build a full-scale demonstrator in order to evaluate its performance and efficiency.