Research Environments & Methods

Wednesday 16:45-17:45



„RDMflow: Managing Research Data Workflows with Micro-Frontends“

Jan Haas, Christoph Göpfert and Martin Gaedke

Abstract— Research data management activities are commonly visualized using the Research Data Management Lifecycle. This lifecycle describes the various phases that research data undergo from the planning phase of a project to the reuse of the data in a subsequent research project. To ensure the reusability of data, the FAIR principles in particular play an important role. According to the FAIR principles, researchers should adopt established best practices of their research domain and use domain-specific standards for data annotation. However, researchers are often not aware which best practices and domain-specific standards apply to their dataset. Additionally, the complexity of some domain-specific standards may overwhelm researchers. With the RDMflow approach, we aim to improve the research data publishing procedure by adequately considering the context of research data. We use the modelling language BPMN to model processes of the research data workflow. Components of the workflow are subsequently mapped to micro-frontends which implement the underlying activity. Workflows may describe arbitrary processes, such as publishing a paper or research data. The flexible and modular architecture created by combining micro-frontends and BPMN models makes it easy to define workflows that help annotate research data from a wide range of fields. This supports researchers in implementing standards and established practices, improving expressiveness, machine-readability, interoperability and reusability of research data.


Keywords: research data management, BPMN, micro-frontends, data publishing, scientific data management



„Living Lab as Third Spaces“

Christian Pentzold, Ingmar Rothe and Andreas Bischof

Abstract— To construct a living lab is one thing, to maintain it another. To invite people to visit a living lab is one thing, to make
them stay another. To cherish diversity is one thing, to move away from the usual suspects is another. In our practice insight contribution, we reflect on the learnings from establishing and upholding a living lab in an urban and distinctively non-academic environment.


Keywords: empirical work, field report, theoretical reflections, practice insight



„Facilitating Ethics Application and Review for Interdisciplinary Human-Participant Research via Software-Based Guidance and Standardization“

Alexandra Bendixen, Thomas G. G. Wegner and Wolfgang Einhäuser

Abstract— Research on human-technology interaction has become highly interdisciplinary. As a consequence, many fields are now performing research on human participants. From an ethical point of view, such research requires careful consideration of the well-being of all involved persons. Review boards for assessing ethical aspects of human-participant research are therefore confronted with steadily rising application volumes. Here we present a software-based approach (“Ethiktool”) that facilitates ethics application and review procedures via a user-oriented dialogue system. Based on the user’s responses in the guided dialogue, the ethics application as well as the information and consent forms to be used for the study participants are automatically created. This ensures consistency and standardization of all documents, which benefits all involved parties alike: the individual researchers applying for ethics approval and the review boards (who both can focus on ethical content) as well as the study participants (who can rely on transparent and standardized information forms). The software-based guidance helps to raise awareness of ethical issues in research, which is highly relevant in view of the ever-increasing possibilities of gathering data from human participants. Our approach will thus foster ethical responsibility of academic institutions towards a broad range of scientific disciplines and society as a whole.


Keywords: ethics approval, human participants, software-based guidance, Ethiktool, user-oriented dialogue, review board



„Advanced Methodological Approach for Designing Innovative Business Models for Hybrid Mobility Technologies“

Marco Rehme, Stephan Odenwald and Uwe Götze

Abstract— Successful interactions of autonomous agents and humans in traffic scenarios will require diverse novel technologies as well as corresponding products and services (e.g. smart objects, data analysis tools and communication services). However, the exploitation of the vast technology-induced innovation potentials is a challenging task for different reasons in the form of typical innovation barriers. The contribution aims to present an advanced business model development approach that is tailored for innovations based on ground-breaking hybrid mobility technologies, such as for enhanced understanding of human perception and behavior or for human-likeness fostering smooth interactions of autonomous agents and humans. This focus implies the need to consider the specific risks and challenges of hybrid technologies (technological, social and legal aspects) and considerably higher uncertainties in the business model development and evaluation methods. The proposed approach integrates technology and business model development to enable an early consideration of customer needs and economic targets in innovation processes. Furthermore, it extends business model development from the company level to the level of interlinked value chains – comprising all interacting players that are necessary for a successful innovation. Additionally, ecological and social perspectives are included besides the economic dimension to ensure the development of sustainable business models. The contribution will demonstrate how a testbed can address challenges arising in the early development phase, such as the collection of real-world data, a timely participation of relevant stakeholders and elaborating still vague opportunities and threats. By allowing experiments and analyses of the functionality or performance of smart objects as well as associated products and services in real traffic situations such a planned “Testbed Hybrid Traffic Chemnitz” will effectively support the development of viable business models.

Keywords: sustainable business model development, innovation barriers, embodied technologies, mobility, value creation networks