Over the past years great effort went into the establishment of research infrastructures for the Humanities and Social Sciences. As a result of the diversity of their targeted research fields and communities, miscellaneous infrastructure projects have developed unique solutions for overlapping target groups. This especially holds for describing available resources by structured metadata and pro...

Green technologies for the environmental upgrading of infrastructures Abstract: Over the last few decades, the globalization phenomenon has determined the exponential development – from an economic, cultural and political standpoint – of traffic flows, the number of means and infrastructures involved in communication and exchange. At the same time, these represent one of the most complicated en...

Positioned at the confluence between human/machine and hardware/software integration and backed by a solid proof of concept realized through several scenarios encompassing e-Securities, e-Health, and e-Logistics for global manufacturing and emergency response management, this work exploits latest advances in information and networking technologies to set a systematic framework for the design of...

National electronic identification systems (e-IDs) are key e-government infrastructures that form the backbone of e-government services. When developed via public-private partnerships (PPP), such e-government infrastructures require appropriate governance arrangements to sustain a delicate balance between governments and the private actors involved. Using the lens of power dependence theory, we...

Societies rely on the social infrastructure for proper societal function. When crises emerge, the importance of the social infrastructure magnifies as people often rely on others, both known and unknown, for support. For citizens experiencing a war environment, however, societal trust can be affected and we show how technologies are used to maintain and create social infrastructures for resilie...

COLearn is a web-based collaborative learning environment that supports the specification of collaborative learning workflows, their deployment and enactment. It addresses major challenges in modern learning infrastructures to enable contextualization, social constructivism and knowledge-pull. It offers a shell, easily integrated on top of existing open learning infrastructures (such as LMSs an...

The increasing complexity and interconnectedness of energy, telecommunications, transportation, and financial infrastructures pose new challenges for secure, reliable management and operation. No single entity has complete control of these multi-scale, distributed, highly interactive networks, or the ability to evaluate, monitor, and manage in real time. In addition, the conventional mathematic...

In this paper we present Unified Communications (UC) as a new class of communication systems, marketed by vendors as a means for integrating communication media and creating presence awareness. Designed as complex infrastructures, UC systems enfold their full potential when being customised to a particular social context. In doing so, the technology allows creating contextspecific presence sign...

introduced in social infrastructures, which are supporting our daily lives. Since the information technologies have progressed very rapidly, the basic structure of each social infrastructure, which was mostly designed in the 19th or the beginning of 20th centuries with few possibility of information technology, should be redesigned with an assumption of the existence of the advanced information...

Although public key infrastructures (PKI) exist for quite a while already, neither hierarchical PKI based on Certification Authorities (CA) nor decentralized webs-of-trust have come to great popularity, particularly not in the private sector. In this paper we want to analyze some reasons for this development and propose possible solutions. The utilization of social networking platforms which ha...