Software Technology and Application Research

The involvement of the non-computer scientist domain expert is one of the biggest challenges of today's computer science, and will become an important factor within STARLab. These domain experts are often not very familiar with formal techniques; so we must investigate methods that make those formal techniques more accessible. We should look at computer linguistics, since natural language represents a universal communication medium that supports negotiation between information analysts and domain experts, and at computer-based learning equipment, and more generally look at tools that more deeply support the underlying cognitive communication process of co-operative intelligent agents (e.g. Groupware, CSCW, computer-supported co- operative work). Multimedia systems can achieve a fundamental link here. The thread running through all of this is a higher level of knowledge representation and the theory, techniques and methods needed for it. Because of the domains under study and the demand of applicability, STARLab research is partly of an experimental nature, which translates in specific equipment and infrastructure. Nevertheless there is also an important and emphatic fundamental theoretical component in this research, e.g. in connection with the representation of semantics of information as needed for mutual communication between information systems.