The FUPOL project was funded under the FP7 work program of the European Union. The focus of FUPOL is the development of an innovative IT solution for policy process modeling, simulation and forecasting, new governance and the joint solution of complex societal problems. The goal of FUPOL is to advance research and development in the areas of simulation, policy process modeling, semantic analysis and visualization. The scientific method used in the project is based on complexity theory. This is considered to be suitable for complex social problems.

The Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences set up the project  “Trend Analytics for Society” (VisCOST)  to identify the economic and societal effects of events, decisions, and trends at an early stage and enable actors to make appropriate decisions from different perspectives. With seventeen partners from 10 European countries, the aim was to optimize and use technological and methodological innovations to identify early trends in the fields of politics, business, education and research and to develop adequate solutions to the identified challenges.

Digitization and digital play an increasingly important role in vocational training, schools and even in university teaching. Various open educational technologies, approaches and methods are available that can be applied for digital learning in a fruitful way. In this context, there is often a lack of understanding basic digital concepts and educational approaches for learning and teaching. Together with our project partners in the fields vocational training, basic language learning and university-level learning, it is intended to use the opportunities offered by digitization for vocational education and training and to open up access possibilities for multipliers, learners, trainers and teachers.

The project “AVARTIM” is to be used to develop a software-supported process for recognizing and evaluating trends, market and technology signals in order to sustainably support the process of innovation and technology management.

Together with our project partners in vocational training, basic language learning, and university-level learning, we used the opportunities offered by digitization for vocational education and training to open up access possibilities for multipliers, learners, trainers, and teachers.

The main goal of this project is to create a sustainable European strategic alliance to foster European research and innovation in the area of Visual Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Simulation, Prediction and Planning of emerging technologies and innovations for business and eGovernance. The strategic alliance is set up for a long period and serves the purpose to discover continuously new opportunities to strengthen the European activities of the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. It aims at investigating various European funding and networking opportunities and submitting proposals to the various European research‐related programs. This project targets networking activities to help setting up the strategic alliance.

UNITE was a collaborative project partially funded by the European Community under the Information Society Technologies (IST) priority of the 6th Framework Programme for R&D. The overall goal of UNITE was to contribute to the improvement of Europe-wide education in secondary schools based on common, innovative principles in technology, in pedagogy, and in learning scenarios, tested by a well-defined validation framework with the main aim to combine different state-of-the-art technologies in e-learning, in order to provide innovative services in an area at the heart of Europe’s knowledge society: the education of the young Europeans.

The access and usage of information technologies is an essential part for the personal and professional qualification in today’s information society. These aspects are invigorated by current studies which subsume that an increasing number of employment positions need access to information sources on the internet. Furthermore these studies show that the access to digital Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) becomes more difficult for humans in rural than urban regions. In consequence there is a high risk for rural populations to get handicapped in comparison to urban populations, especially by using IC-Technologies as instrument for “Lifelong learning”.

Semantic Technologies and semantically annotated information open a broad spectrum of new possibilities for discovering and transferring knowledge. Every bit of information has connections to every other information from the chosen domain. Data that was processed in this form can be searched faster and represented in a form that is much closer to human needs and habits and thus enables the user to find a natural and more efficient way of acquiring and understanding new concepts and relations hidden in the data. one challenge in this context is the adequate visualization of this information. How can semantic information be visualized to ensure maximal efficiency? How can we use the characteristic properties of an ontology to improve search, acquisition, and transfer of information?

TEXO is a research project within the THESEUS research program initiated by the Federal Ministry of Economy and Technology (BMWi). THESEUS aims at developing a new Internet-based infrastructure in order to improve both the usability and practicability of knowledge available on the Internet. Within the THESEUS program, TEXO contributes to the service economy by creating infrastructure components for Business Webs in the Internet of Services (IoS).

The joint research project Smarter Privacy addresses the field of “software-based legal compliance in Smart Grid / eMobility”. Goal of the project is to ensure the legal requirements concerning data privacy protection and evidentiary value. Especially with dynamically changing market participants the innovation openness for future developments should be maintained.

Fraunhofer IGD developed in the joint project VIntEL (Distributed Integrated test environment) in cooperation with Fraunhofer IOSB and the Federal Ministry of Defense (BMVg) innovative user interfaces and visualizations for representing semantic relations in different domains. Within two project iterations already three different visualizations for interacting with semantic information were provided. In this context the main focus is on interacting with complex semantic contents based on the SemaVis-Framework. In the last project iteration semantic visualizations are integrated in the VIntEl system to allow a seamless data access and to exhaust the benefit of graphical visualizations.

Anyone who recognizes the signs of the times ensures a decisive advantage in the market. In the project »Signal Tracing« the Group Semantics Visualization at Fraunhofer IGD and the partners C21 Consulting and ConWeaver develop a solution to identify and evaluate market trends at an early stage. Companies have to be aware of upcoming trends, market developments, and technological developments to respond to the increasing competitive pressures and rapid changes in their industry. They must extract weak signals from the large amount of information available to pave the way well-founded.

The group “Semantics Visualization” of Fraunhofer IGD developed in the context of the joint project MErK in cooperation with Fraunhofer IOSB innovative user interfaces and visualizations for representing semantic relations in different domains. Within two project iterations already three different visualizations for interacting with semantic information were provided to the project partners. In this context, the main focus is on handling complex content and a system based on the SemaVis framework. The implemented system allows an intuitive interaction with these complex data structures. In the last project iteration, semantic visualizations are integrated into the system of Fraunhofer IOSB to allow seamless data access and to exhaust the benefit of graphical visualizations.