Motivated by the current trends on the Internet, displaying increasing supply of content from anonymous users (e.g. blogs) which become popular among the users, the present research at DBIS explores the tradeoffs between the source's reputation and the way content is displayed or offered in the Web page based on the framing strategy used.

We began to study the Internet user choice of information services in the form of online news. Our research builds upon behavioural economics and it focuses on the interaction between background and local context effectsin the individual choice.

We started to investigate the tradeoffs between the reputations of the source, representing the background context effects, and the provision of enriched content (e.g. source bundled with a picture or a video), representing local context effects. The study involved a set of online experiments of hypothetical choices or matching tasks.

We are currently investigating the web user's choice of online news in a multi-attribute context.

The work is part of a cooperation with Professor Ioanna Constantiou, at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Danemark.

Our research investigate Online Sociability as the interaction between Intention, Intensity and Cooperation Styles, in the context of social networks, such as Facebook.
Work in cooperation with Professor Volker Mahnke, Copenhagen Business School (CBS).

One of our current research directions at DBIS, my research group at the Goethe University Frankfurt, is called "Self Revealing".

I call the user's  "self revealing" process, a process by which a person allows traits of his self or presumed self, to appear, be visible and be traceable through his background and present experiences, both in real situations and in a digital context.

I call background experiences any learning-oriented situations a person has experienced, which have happened before a given point in time. Background experiences are very relevant when we consider the user behavior and the user decision process. The fact that, now days, a part of the person’s background experiences occur in a digital world, allows their digital tracebility. I call this digital traces. Combined with what I call the foreground experience, that is the current context in which a decision process occurs, such experiences do influence the local choice. When part of the background experiences occur in a digital world, digital traces are left and can be stored permanently in a digitalized format. They can then be seen, analyzed, processed and interpreted.  The digital traces the user allows to leave, characterize a part of his real self or presumed self. Digital traces are characterized by a number of factors related to the experiences the users had in the digital world. For example the actions the user has performed on a given web site, the time spent on specific web pages, the links to other pages or web sites the user has followed. The internet is full of such digital traces. When a person is making a decision, we can look at the digital traces he has left in his digital background experiences, and at the information we might have of his real background experiences and relate them together into a user profile.

The fundamental idea behind this research area is it to give tools to the owner of a Web portal, that allow him to perform the following tasks:

• to analyze, to store and to predict the behavior and interest of (registered) visitors of a web site.
• to group visitor with similar or comparable behavior and/or interest.
• to offer the visitors personalised E-services based upon the assigned cluster

The Web provides a simple and universal infrastructure to exchange various kinds of information. In order to share, interpret, and manipulate information worldwide, the role of metadata is widely recognized. Indeed, metadata allow us to easily locate information available in the Web, by providing descriptions about the structure and the content of the various Web resources (eg. data, documents, images, etc.) and for different purposes.

The "Semantic Web", a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, is used to denote the next evolution step of the Web. Associating meaning with content or establishing a layer of machine understandable data would allow automated agents, sophisticated search engines and interoperable services, will enable higher degree of automation and more intelligent applications. The ultimate goal of the Semantic Web is to allow machines the sharing and exploitation of knowledge in the Web way, i.e. without central authority, with few basic rules, in a scalable, adaptable, extensible manner. With RDF as the basic platform for the Semantic Web, a multitude of tools, methods and systems have just appeared on the horizon.

We currently concentrate on the useage of ontologies for the integration of data from different sources.

This area is lead by Karsten Tolle. Please click here for further information and resources.