Theses and Internships

PhD Theses

MSc Theses

BSc Theses

PhD Theses

Compact Representation of Temporal Repetition

Name:Romans Kasperovics
Supervisor:Michael Böhlen, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
Tutor:Johann Gamper, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Data Integration

Name:Nikolaus Augsten
Supervisor:Michael Böhlen, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
Tutor:Johann Gamper, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

E-government promises to revolutionize government and its interaction with customers. To reach these high-level goals, an important topic on the agenda of e-government is the integration of data from distributed sources within and among different public authorities. The integration process poses a number of technical problems, such as the use of different data formats, schema integration, or limited access. Moreover, databases tend to become inconsistent since different databases store information about the same real-world objects, constraints are rarely used, and people apply different conventions in referencing the same real-world object.

The aim of this thesis is to study the integration of hierarchical data structures from different data sources using approximate matching techniques. One conrete application szeanrio we are using is the Municipality of Bozen-Bolzano, where data from different sources have to be joined via residential addresses of citizens. Residential addresses have a hierarchical structure. Another important class of hierarchical data structures are XML documents.

MSc Theses

Workflow Management Systems for e-Government Applications

Name:Romualdas Juskevicius
Period:10/2006-03/2007
Supervisor:Johann Gamper, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
Tutor:Walter Costanzi, Municipality of Bozen-Bolzano

Digital Identity for eGovernment: Customizing the eMayor Platform for Different Smart Cards

Name:Jürgen Dellatorre
Period:03/2006-10/2006
Supervisor:Johann Gamper, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
Tutor:Walter Costanzi, Municipality of Bozen-Bolzano

Digital identity is a crucial pillar in today's eGovernment applications. Smart cards are currently the best option for secure communication in terms of costs and level of protection. The eGovernment platform eMayor, offers high security with low costs. This international project, funded by the European Union, fully supports cross border requests for residence certificate for citizens as well as for civil servants.

The goal of this paper is to show the advantages of smart cards in eGovernment applications. We will see the eMayor project in detail and the undertaken customizations. These consist mainly in changing eMayor in such a way that it works also with a different type of smart card, one that is valid in Italy. Afterwards the addition of further smart card is just a minor effort.

BSc Theses

Computing Isochrones in Multi-Modal Transport Networks

Name:Veronika Bauer
Period:04/2007-10/2007
Supervisor:Johann Gamper and Igor Timko, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
Tutor:Roberto Loperfido, Municipality of Bozen-Bolzano

The scope of this bachelor thesis is the computation of isochrones for the project BZ10M of the municipality of Bozen-Bolzano. Isochrones are defined as a set of points from which a defined location is reachable isochronuosly. This concept is applied in a broad range of scientific areas. Since the scope of BZ10M is the analysis and planning of the local infrastructure, the concept of isochrones is made use of in the following way: a location in Bozen-Bolzano (for example, the university) is selected as destination and a time threshold (for example, 10 minutes) is chosen. All the points in the city from which the university is reachable in those 10 minutes build up the requested isochrone. Regarding the accessibility, there are two aspects that have to be taken into account: firstly, the model of the town being used for this work is modeled as a network. Consequently, all crossroads in the city are represented as nodes, whereas the connecting street segments are taking the role of edges. Secondly, this thesis takes into account different transport modalities like walking or public transport. However, these means of transports are not stored in the same network. As a result, the computation of isochrones has to be done in a way allowing for correctly navigating and mapping between those networks. This thesis proposes a generic algorithm supporting the computation of isochrones for any number of networks. One part of the solution is based on the Shortest Path algorithm of Dijkstra and is used for calculating isochrones in a single network. The other part of the algorithm provides the functions for correctly traversing and mapping between the various networks. The practical application of the algorithm uses different networks of the infrastructure of Bozen-Bolzano. At this stage of the research, two means of transportation are supported, walking and travelling by bus. The implementation is done in Java 5 and Oracle Spatial 10.2, the technologies used for BZ10M. Some parts of the developed algorithm are implemented with Oracle Spatial functions optimising the computations.

A distance Measure for Approximate Joins over Residential Addresses

Name:Davide Schuen
Period:04/2004-10/2004
Supervisor:Johann Gamper, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
Tutor:Nikolaus Augsten, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Franco Barducci and Walter Costanzi, Municipality of Bozen-Bolzano

The Municipality of Bolzano-Bozen has databases that store different information about the citizens. Data about a single object is distributed over several data sources. For some administrative tasks the data inside these heterogeneous and autonomous databases has to be joined. Applying standard joining techniques ends up with poor results, as there are no common keys. The data shows irregularities because of spelling mistakes, abbreviations and different naming conventions in the data fields. This work proposes a distance measure on common attributes of the databases, the addresses and the personal data. This measure is used to approximately join tuples coming from different databases. In this thesis I analyze the accuracy of the matches by evaluating a number of experiments executed on the databases of the cadastre, registration office and the electric power company. A tool generates the experiments applying the distance measure on residential and personal data of two tuples using q-grams and edit distance algorithms. The data is cleaned to improve the quality and quantitiy of good approximate matches.

The full thesis is available here.

Using Approximate String Matching Techniques to Join Street Names of Residential Addresses

Name:Roland Innerhofer-Oberperfler
Period:04/2004-06/2004
Supervisor:Johann Gamper, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
Tutor:Nikolaus Augsten, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

For many administrative tasks at the Municipality of Bolzano-Bozen a number of autonomous databases have to be accessed. In order to compute these tasks more efficiently, the content of these databases should be linked automatically. A promising join attribute are residential addresses, as they appear in more or less all databases. Standard join techniques give poor results for joining address data. Reasons are spelling mistakes, abbreviations, and different naming conventions for street names. The main goal of this work is to overcome these problems by using approximate string matching techniques in order to find good matches for street names. In this thesis I analyze the accuracy and efficiency of two approximate string matching algorithms for matching street names: q-gram and edit-distance. This analysis is based on experiments using street names of residential databases at the Municipality of Bolzano-Bozen, and on experiments using virtual test sets. Moreover, I present two algorithms to match two sets of street names. These algorithms use the string matching algorithms to calculate the distance between strings. Further, I present a tool, which uses the string matching techniques to match street names from input-databases. This tool provides the user with a good overview of the matches found in the input-databases.

The full thesis is available here.

Evaluation of the Accessibility of a Web Site to People with Different Handicaps: The Case of Bolzano-Bozen Municipality

Name:Anna De Villa Tondo
Period:04/2004-06/2004
Supervisor:Andrea Molinari and Johann Gamper, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
Tutor:Laila Calanca, Municipality of Bozen-Bolzano

The aim of this thesis is the analysis of the web pages of the Municipality of Bozen-Bolzano, facing one of the most difficult topics proposed by the current web sites regulation, namely the management of web accessibility for people with handicaps. Public authorities have the duty to guarantee easy access to every citizen who needs to make use of information and services offered. The results of this thesis are a methodology to evaluate the level of difficulties for disabled persons and an analysis of the web pages of the Municipality of Bozen-Bolzano including suggestions to create pages which are more accessible for people with handicaps.

Internships

Web Services in e-Government

Name:Martin Meraner
Period:08/2003-11/2003
Supervisor:Johann Gamper, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
Tutor:Walter Costanzi, Municipality of Bozen-Bolzano

The retrieval and assignment of a protocol number for every ingoing and outgoing communication at the Municipality of Bozen-Bolzano slows down the daily governmental business processes. The main objectives of the intership are: (1) Study the state of the art of Web service technology; (2) implement and test a Web service for the protocol service of the Municipality of Bozen-Bolzano; (3) comparison and evaluation of different technologies and implementations.

The full report is available here.