The Natural History Museum in Berlin (Museum für Naturkunde - Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science) is  among the top 10 world-wide and the largest of its kind in Germany. The museum is home to over 30 Mio. collection objects, more than 250 researchers and more than 400 research assistants as well as PhD students, from disciplines such as biology, paleontology, mineralogy and information science.

Behind the publicly accessible spaces, these researchers work on manyfold projects in a multidisciplinary research setting. To bolster the Natural History Museum's efforts at ensuring knowledge transfer throughout its organisation, the Human-Centered Computing (HCC) Research Group collaborates with the museum in this BMBF-funded project to unveil the currently tacit knowledge, competencies, methods and research project information to the employees of the museum. A formal ontology is developed to support this endeavor.

We aim to provide the researchers at museum with (1) Wiki-based read and write access to research project information, (2) insights about potentials for knowledge transfer powered by linked data and (3) interactive visualisations of these networked sources of knowledge. Focussing on the seamless integration of these provisions, the HCC Research Group aims to set up an actionable and holistic system that visualises research project data and their potential for knowledge transfer in research museums like the Natural History Museum.

You can find further information about the project on the website of the Natural History Museum. 

Data and Software

• Project IKON on GitHub
• IKON ontology on GitHub

References

• Oppenlaender, J.; Glöckler, F.; Hoffmann, J.; Müller-Birn, C. (2017): Reifegradmodelle für ein integriertes Forschungsdatenmanagement in multidisziplinären Forschungsorganisationen. E-Science-Tage, Heidelberg.
• Oppenlaender, J.; Benjamin, J.; Müller-Birn, C. (2017): Socio-technical Revelation of Knowledge Transfer Potentials. HCOMP, Quebec City, Canada.
• Oppenlaender, J.; Benjamin, J.; Müller-Birn, C. (2018): Towards Sociotechnical Management of Intra-Organisational Knowledge Transfer. MKWI, Lüneburg.
• Benjamin, J. (forthcoming) (June 2018): Complex Intentions: A Methodology for Contemporary Design Practice. ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2018, Hongkong.

Theses

Bachelor Thesis

• Camara, Anja: Animierte Transitionen für die Visualisierung von Veränderungen in Clustering-Ergebnissen
• Hanja, Anupam: Portierung einer Webanwedung mit Datenvisualisierungen für Large Screen Touch-Displays
• Joppien, Lilli: Result-driven Interactive Visual Support of Parameter Selection for Dimensionality Reduction
• Korjakow, Tim: Developing Interpretability Techniques for Unsupervised Topic Modeling
• Paderow, Andrè Slava: Visualisation of Linked Data Entities
• Tschiersch, Lea: Animated Transitions to Support Visualization of Missing Data
• Vasilev, Vasil: Multi-Perspective information visualization of Linked Data for Humanities Research

Master Thesis

• Bayram, Ömer: Visualisation of Linked Data Entities
• Pelzer, Immanuel: Ontologie-basierte und relationale Datenvisualiserung im Vergleich