Periodic Activity Report, WS-Talk, COOP-CT-2004-6026
Reporting period
Delivery date
Author
Version
Periodic Activity Report
2 (December 2005, November 2006)
November 16, 2006
Kurt Englmeier, LemonLabs
1.0
Content
Executive summary ..................................................................................................................... 2
Section 1. Project objectives and major achievements ................................................................ 4
Section 2. Work package progress of the period ......................................................................... 9
Section 3. Consortium Management.......................................................................................... 12
Section 4. Other issues ............................................................................................................. 14
Contributions of SMEs, RTDs, and external partners in WS-Talk ............................................ 14
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Final Periodic Activity Report, WS-Talk, COOP-CT-2004-6026
Executive summary
Human Actors as Key Designer
Usually the key actors, the domain experts of business processes, are not IT experts,
and thus do not become the main designers of the IT supporting their business
processes. WS-Talk encourages the co-existence of Natural Language and Web
service technology. It reinforces the role of domain experts in designing
business processes without having to resort to their IT colleagues. In our
approach business process experts write storybooks in their own language. Their
instructions are matched with semantics that represent application logic that, in turn,
supports the automatic composition of software components. WS-Talk borrows from
Speech Act Theory, using word speech to analyze and classify natural language
instructions in storybooks.
Universally available services, which communicate in a standardized way, can provide a
new generation of middleware. Harnessing the advantages of this promising middleware
technology, however, means to be capable to understand and to handle its design
language which emerges from standards like SOAP, WSDL, BPEL, etc. If at all, only IT
experts are familiar with these languages. Natural language provides a natural way for
human actors to express behaviour and context of an application.
Human actors prefer the use of natural language for the definition or description of
business processes. These natural language descriptions can be transformed
into statements which are executable by computers. The transformation process,
in turn, resorts to Semantic web meta-information which is designed by the IT experts.
WS-Talk focuses primarily on coexistence of natural language and semantic web
standards in a layered architecture for applications based on Web Services.
WS-Talk means a number of products, the Service Designer, the Service
Execution Engine, the Controlled Vocabulary Designer, and so forth. However, it
means also a number of features that make up WS-Talk’s strong text and content
analysis capabilities. Coupled with a few, but extremely useful ontologies these features
are in the position, to analyse and characterize information that appears in unstructured
(primarily textual) or semi-structured forms. Up to some 80 percent of all available and
provided information in companies is unstructured – depending on the sector and
company size.
Content management, in general, aims to get the right information to the
right people at the right time, in the right context. And the right context includes
the language and cultural context of the people to be addressed. A technician in
Santiago de Chile, for example, requests a very particular instruction, necessary to
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maintain a particular part of a machine which can be obtained from a manual issued in
English by its German IT department. Even if the technician understands the English
instructions she prefers to state her query in Spanish.
This example shows WS-Talk’s focus on effective and multilingual information
logistics which opens new prospects for boosting efficiency. Providing the information
consumers with the things they require in a cost effective way conserves their most
valuable resource: time. However, WS-Talk goes one decisive step ahead: it
acknowledges that people require not only static information but also information
producing business processes. And in this context, effective information logistics means
also that the information consumers themselves can adapt these processes to their
personal requirements without resorting to their IT-personnel.
The WS-Talk technology requires and provides also a solid base of advanced text and
content analysis features: natural language has to be analysed quite on a fine-grained
level in order to understand and to interpret correctly the user’s instruction. WS-Talk’s
analysis features, however, have been extended to more situations where fine-grained
analysis of content is necessary.
1) Sensible retrieval: Finding the right table or figure or chapter in a voluminous
compendium, finding the right passage in a user’s manual, or – in one word – finding
the right spot in a large volume of information.
2) Combining hard facts and soft facts: The next step was the combination of text
information and factual data including even ontologies. Data mining applications are the
first addressees of this expansion.
3) Service composition and orchestration: If we take now software components or
services as information producing modules and if know that the behaviour of these
application parts is captured in descriptions, we can easily extend the approach of WSTalk’s technology towards service orchestration.
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Section 1. Project objectives and major achievements
The objective of WS-Talk is to develop an instrument that enables the human experts in
business processes rather than the IT expert to define business processes. And the
expert uses just natural language for the definition or description of processes. These
natural language descriptions are transformed into statements which are executable by
computers. The transformation process, in turn, resorts to Semantic web metainformation which is designed by the IT experts.
To achieve this vision, the activities of the WS-Talk consortium were focused on:
 development of Interpreter features with advanced text/content analysis
capabilities
 development of a Service Designer that supports the user in writing storybooks
 development of a Service Execution Engine (SEE) that inclines to established
standards of Web service choreography. The SEE executes the storybooks
 development of a Controlled Vocabulary Designer which supports IT
personnel to set up ontologies about the terminology used in the respective
business process context
 installation of reference sites with pilot users
The development of the WS-Talk text features started in November 2004, the
development of the WS-Talk started soon afterwards, i.e. in February 2005. At the
moment, the features are available and tested in the application context of document
management by five pilot users (external partners of WS-Talk) in Greece, Germany, and
Chile.
The WS-Talk products are tested right now with a small number of industrial partners
(three, two in Germany and one in Chile). It is expected that the products are mature
enough for their market introduction in the third quarter of 2007.
The WS-Talk features and products were and are developed in a close
cooperation among partners from academia and SMEs active in software
development. The cornerstones of this cooperation can be sketched as follows. They
just give a glance on the cooperation, but not a comprehensive picture.
IRIT Lab (Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse) is an institute with profound knowledge
and experience in the broad area of language science. It was the project’s key partner
when it comes to text analysis and linguistic feature extraction.
Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL) provided a number of useful approaches
and prototypical solutions for the maintenance of Controlled Vocabularies and supported
the development of design principles for the business process management as
addressed by the WS-Talk Service Execution Engine.
Forth-ICS (Greece) provided data mining techniques in connection with text analysis.
Our Chilean partners Universidad Diego Portales (UDP) and Soluciones (software
development) co-developed and integrated a service registry features. The registry is
actually used with a pilot reference system.
AKRA (software development) was the major software developer and integrator in WSTalk.
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Final Periodic Activity Report, WS-Talk, COOP-CT-2004-6026
All SME partners of WS-Talk were quite active in recruiting a first community of pilot
users. The most successful partner here is Soluciones. It maintains a close cooperation
with three companies in Chile (stuff recruiting and banks).
AKRA and Soluciones form a close co-operation for the further development and
exploitation of WS-Talk beyond the scope of this project.
WS-Talk’s framework for service composition and orchestration builds on the
Language Action Perspective (LAP) and Speech Act Theory which provides
means to develop the necessary communicative orientation for HCI with a strong and
feasible emphasis on natural language. LAP contributed to a number of models for the
coordination of work. It is also reflected in the concept of “conversation-for-action” (cfa)
introduced by Winograd and Flores. In the interaction with the system a user conducts
communicative acts that may address requests, commitments, offers, promises,
declarations etc. Each phase of the loop thus consists of a communicative action, but
also of a productive or informative action. In general, a requester (or customer)
requests work or information from a performer. The objective of the productive (or
informative) act (the work to be done, for instance) is usually embedded in a
communicative act manifested in the message exchange between the actors involved.
Speech Act Theory now connects the content of the message with the
speaker’s intention. There are different intentions: assertions (statements about realworld situations), expressions (attitudes and emotional states), and directives
(instructions to get the hearer to act). The context of the communication act can be
considered as an extension of the content of a message. The intention and thus the
communication act are reflected by the wording used in the speaker’s statement. The
linguistic constructs for the speaker’s intentions are called performatives. They enable
us to classify statements along the speaker’s intentions.
In the context of the WS-Talk methodology the productive act is called P-Act
(production act) and the communicative act is called C-Act (coordination act). A
transaction thus is a combination of a C-Act with one or more P-Acts. Each PAct leads to a result, i.e. produces a P-fact. The combination of transaction and fact(s)
is called an atomic building block of a business process.
Let us consider the following example storybook statements:
1. “Whenever new data on business climate of the chemical industry are available
send an email to client XYZ”
2. “Inform me when user XYZ paid bill no. 123.
3. “An indicator model is based on time series concerning business climate,
incoming orders, business climate expectations.”
4. “Actual situation: last value of a time series”
5. “Inform department ABC on the latest figures on business expectations of the
chemical industry.”
6. “The indicator series results from an aggregation over business climate (weight:
30%), incoming orders (weight: 40%), and actual revenues (weight: 30%).”
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Examples 1 and 2 refer to the performative “commissive”, 3 and 4 are declaratives, 5 is
informative, and 6 a request. Each of these performatives follows a different protocol.
The commissive may be implemented as a thread that repeatedly checks if a certain
condition is fulfilled or an event has happened and executes then the corresponding PAct (“Inform me” or “send an email”, for instance). The conditions are indicated by the
words “whenever” and “when”.
Use scenario
The following use scenario provides a practical view on WS-Talk’s technology. It shows
a storybook written with the WS-Talk service designer. It refers to a retrieval system for
product information. The example reflects a number of steps required for a typical data
mining task.
Storybook:
Alert feature for important changes in sales figures
Valid for the product category shoes and distribution channel
wholesale
Important change: outstanding or significant change
Outstanding change: actual change more than 7%
Significant change: actual change more than 3%
Actual change: difference between last value of a time series and
the average of its five preceding periods
Whenever an important change is observed inform colleague John
Smith
The first line contains the title of the storybook which addresses an alert feature (an
object or service that manages alerts) that is triggered by a certain event, namely an
important change in sales figures.
The next line indicates a restriction (“valid for”) that applies for this alert feature. In the
example case the alert feature should be applied only to data that refer to the product
category shoes and the distribution channel wholesale.
The following three lines reflect typical definitions of concepts that are valid in this and
similar contexts.
The fifth instruction is also a concept definition referring to “actual change” a definition
which is required in the previous definitions.
When defining “actual change” the user writes down this concept and when typing the
first letters of “difference” the content of the following object description pops up. The
terms required in the context of this object are indicated within square brackets. The
designer then prompts the user to specify these place holders. Applicable parameters
can be filtered from further object representations like the one used for differences.
Let us consider the required parameter “last value of a time series”. This parameter
matches obviously the concept “element of time series” which, in turn, is a parameter
returned by the object for “retrieval of time series”. This abstract description for
retrieval explains also how a particular value can be retrieved: the P-act “access” has to
be called and the P-option “filter” has to be activated with a particular date as
parameter. The correct parameter to be passed to the filter method and the correct
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Final Periodic Activity Report, WS-Talk, COOP-CT-2004-6026
name of the filter method can be achieved through the index terms of the method
TimeSeries.getElement(…).
The last instruction in our example provides details for the alert service. It mentions the
condition under which the alert service shall be triggered and the addressee of the alert.
It is not clear from the storybook which messaging system is used. This explicit
information is not important for the author of the storybook, because she or he usually
knows the type of messaging system used for purposes like an alert. The detailed
specification of the messaging system is part of the implementation of the
corresponding service. The verb “inform” is linked to the P-Act “Messaging System”
which is represented in a similar way like “Retrieval”. The parameter “colleague John
Smith” is passed to the corresponding object and translated into Mr. Smith’s email
address or something similar.
More interesting is the interpretation of the condition. “Whenever an important change
is observed” calls for an installation of a thread which repeatedly checks if the
corresponding data fulfil the condition for an important change. If the condition is
reached the messaging systems triggers the alert message to Mr Smith.
Writing a storybook in the context of WS-Talk is different from writing task or job
descriptions. The controlled vocabulary in our case determines also the words that can
be chosen by the author of the storybook. The author thus just selects words that are
selectable in the respective context of the instruction she wants to describe.
Exploitation
WS-Talk is not targeting a broad mass-consumer market. Nevertheless the market for
WS-Talk products is a broad one and determined by technology providers for content
management systems, support management systems, enterprise search engines, and
enterprise application/service integration systems. For all these systems WS-Talk
provides a technology that raises the efficiency of their information logistics. This means
that WS-Talk features and products are integral components for support management
systems, content management systems, enterprise search engines and enterprise
service integration.
The main focus of the exploitation of AKRA (and Soluciones) within a time frame from
now until twelve months after the project’s end is on these four application areas. This
does not mean, of course, that there won’t be any further area emerging as an
interesting or potential market sector; customer relationship management could be such
a sector, for instance.
The results of WS-Talk products and features can be considered as inventions which
now have to be transformed into innovations and further into marketable products. The
process of adoption of inventions through the target community has started during the
project and manifested itself in a number of reference sites (for instance, NarrNetz, the
cooperation with University of Hamburg and AKRA). WS-Talk’s exploitation rationale
emerges from customer economics which advocate an innovative, customer-centric
approach to business strategy. This approach is indispensable when it comes to merge
business strategy with innovation.
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The first phase (A) of WS-Talk’s business strategy focuses on individual customer
solutions (individually customized support centre solution by Soluciones (as indicated in
the scenario) or text mining/content management solution by Archimedia, for example).
They represent unique and comprehensive value proposition to individual customers. It
is a 180 degree departure from Best Product positioning towards a customer-centric
business strategy. In such a strategy the objective is not selling mass products. It
focuses on understanding each customer’s specific problems and economics, then to
develop unique, differentiated, customized solutions for them, and then to replicate this
process with a growing number of customers.
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Final Periodic Activity Report, WS-Talk, COOP-CT-2004-6026
Section 2. Work package progress of the period
Work-package number:
1
Project Management
Participant
Lemon
ARMD
AKRA
Labs
Lucky
Solucio
eye
nes
RHUL
IRIT
FORTH
UDP
-ICS
(resp)
Person-months (planned): 18
effort in year 1
Person-months (total)
18
8
18
Work-package number:
2
WS-Talk products and utilities
Objectives
1) Development of the Service Designer
2) Development of the Controlled Vocabulary Designer
3) Development of the Service Execution Engine
Tasks related to the development text analysis features have been
shifted to workpackage 3.
Observations
Participant
Lemon
ARMD
Labs
Person-months (planned): 99
Modified to 59 after mid-term
review (adapted to 57,5 at the
end of project)
effort in year 1 (36,5 months)
effort in year 2 (21 months)
Person-months (total): 57,5
7
7
14
AKRA
Lucky
Solucio
(resp)
eye
nes
11
11
18
8
5,5
13,5
12
3,5
15,5
RHUL
IRIT
1
27
7
4
11
2,5
1
3,5
FORTH
UDP
-ICS
15
16
Work-package number:
3
WS-Talk service proxies
Objectives
1) Development of content analysis features
2) Implementation and deployment of analysis features as Java classes
3) Implementation and deployment of text and query analysis as Web
services
Tasks related to the development text analysis features have been
shifted from workpackage 2.
Observations
Participant
Lemon
ARMD
AKRA
Labs
Person-months (planned): 64
Modified to 104 after mid-term
review (adapted to 101,1 at the
end of project)
effort in year 1 (53 months)
effort in year 2 (48,1 months)
Person-months (total): 101,1
Lucky
Solucio
RHUL
eye
nes
(resp)
-ICS
30
17
17
1
1
3
7
10
5
5
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8
4
12
8
7
15
IRIT
16
11
27
FORTH
12
16,6
28,6
UDP
2,5
2,5
Final Periodic Activity Report, WS-Talk, COOP-CT-2004-6026
Work-package number:
4
Application integration and knowledge transfer
Objectives
Observations
1) Integrative solution for WS-Talk
2) Knowledge transfer to South America
Installation of reference sites (and thus a significant part of the
integration effort) is completely covered by WP 6. Originally it has been
addressed partly in this WP.
Participant
Lemon
Person-months (planned): 23
effort in year 1 (4,5 months)
effort in year 2 (11,5 months)
Person-months (total): 16
AKRA
Lucky
Solucio
Labs
ARMD
(resp)
eye
nes
-ICS
4
2,5
2
4,5
4
6
1
2
3
9
2
2
RHUL
IRIT
2
2
FORTH
2
2
Work-package number:
5
Evaluation and assessment
Objectives
(1) the usability of the interfaces of Service Designer and Controlled
Vocabulary Designer,
(2) the added-value of the overall technology design, and
(3) the content mining feature.
UDP
1
1,5
2,5
Observations
Participant
Lemon
ARMD
Labs
Person-months (planned): 18
Modified to 17 according to
recommendations of the midterm review
WP started in year 2
Person-months (total): 17
2
4
AKRA
Lucky
Solucio
(resp)
eye
nes
4
4
4
2
4
RHUL
IRIT
FORTH
UDP
-ICS
1
Work-package number:
6
Dissemination and exploitation
Objectives
1) Scientific and commercial dissemination
2) WS-Talk web site
3) Reference sites (pilot users)
1
9
IRIT
FORTH
Observations
Participant
Lemon
ARMD
Labs
Person-months (planned): 26
Modified to 45 at the end of the
project
effort in year 1 (19,5 months)
effort in year 2 (26,5 months)
Person-months (total): 45
AKRA
Lucky
Solucio
(resp)
eye
nes
RHUL
UDP
-ICS
2
2
2
2
2
4
4
4
4
2
3,5
5,5
2
4
6
4
4
1
1
2,5
2,5
5
3
3,5
6,5
4,5
3,5
8
3
6
6
1,5
1,5
3
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Final Periodic Activity Report, WS-Talk, COOP-CT-2004-6026
Co-operative Research Project Effort
Participant
Lemon
ARMD
AKRA
Labs
WP1
WP2
WP3
WP4
WP5
WP6
Totals
18,0
14,0
1,0
4,5
10,0
2,0
5,5
43,0
6,0
18,0
13,5
5,0
2,0
4,0
24,5
Lucky
Solucio
eye
nes
15,5
1,0
16,5
12,0
3,0
4,0
5,0
24,0
RHUL
IRIT
FORTH-
UDP
Totals
ICS
11,0
15,0
2,0
1,0
6,5
35,5
3,5
27,0
1,0
8,0
39,5
28,6
2,0
9,0
6,0
45,6
Planned
totals
2,5
2,5
3,0
8,0
18,0
57,5
101,1
16,0
17,0
45,0
254,6
18,0
99,0
64,0
23,0
18,0
26,0
248,0
Total person efforts sum up to 254,6 person months for WS-Talk. This
exceeds the originally planned effort of 248 person months.
Costs, reported by the RTD partner IRIT and RHUL for the first year of WS-Talk, do not
correspond to their effort for this period. Costs reported for the second period, however,
correspond completely to their effort of the second year, but include also a fraction of
their first year’s effort.
At the end of the project, person effort and costs of the partner UDP had to be
adjusted: the effort of Mr. Javier Pereira who has been contracted temporarily to the
Chilean SME partner Soluciones as well as temporarily to the Chilean RTD partner UDP
has been assigned partly twice to the project during WS-Talk’s first term. This has been
corrected now. It leads to a reduction of UDP’s person effort from 19 person months to
8 person months. The corresponding costs of 19.417,10 € are now stated for the second
term of the project. The amount of 2,5 person months as occurred in the first term
entered UDP’s financial account for the second term.
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Section 3. Consortium Management
Kurt Englmeier of LemonLabs served the role of project manager, supervised the
activities of the entire project team and offered conflict management. Project
management was accompanied by the Technical Management, taken over by the SME
partner AKRA; RHUL provided scientific advice.
AKRA set up the central WS-Talk communication platform for the consortium.
LemonLabs was in charge with the project’s web site.
The rationale of project management was to let the project evolve as much as possible
along the interests and capabilities of the partners. The driving force should be their
self-understanding of a comprehensive project progress that meets the objectives of
WS-Talk and takes into account the projects dynamic technical and commercial
environment.
Delegation happened only when a partner had problems to identify its role in such a
self-propelled progress of the project. However, almost all partners had no problems to
follow this rationale.
Project Meetings.
 A kick-off meeting was held in Munich on December 17, 2004. Besides knowing
face-to-face the persons behind the WS-Talk project, the main objective was to
develop a common self-understanding of the project’s objectives and its vision. A
first road map has been developed for the first six months.
 A technical meeting took place in Munich on June 24, 2005.
 A WS-Talk Integration Meeting has been held at RHUL, London, on April 6, 2006.
The rationale of this meeting was to organize the next and final steps for
technical integration of WS-Talk features and tools into the existing WS-Talk
products Service Designer, Service Execution Engine, and Controlled Vocabulary
Designer.
 The Second WS-Talk Project meeting took place at Luckyeye, Istanbul, on June 8
and 9, 2006. This meeting provided a general overview on the technical state-ofthe-art in WS-Talk and addressed a more profound and substantial development
of the exploitation strategy in WS-Talk.
Communication within the consortium was primarily informal. There were a number of
bilateral meetings, but the main communication instrument was email and the WS-Talk
forum (www.akra.de/ws-talk/). If a partner had an interest in developing a certain
feature for the WS-Talk products it informed the consortium or the project manager
about its intention. If project management approved that this idea was in line with the
objectives of the project, the respective partner continued with the development and
stored afterwards the results at the WS-Talk forum where all partners (but at least the
project manager) had the opportunity to criticize the result and trigger an iterative circle
of software improvements. Scientific publications were in general submitted in
accordance with the project manager’s approval.
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Partner Changes. By the beginning of the project the Queen’s University of Belfast
(QUB) has been replaced by the Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL). The
department of computer science which was in fact the QUB’s unit to be involved in WSTalk moved from QUB to RHUL. The key personnel, however, didn’t change. A similar
reason led to the partner change in Chile, where the Universidad de Talca (UTalca) has
been replaced by the Universidad Diego Portales (UDP). Again, the key personnel for
WS-Talk moved from one department of computer science to another. The continuity of
work was never challenged by these changes.
Conflicts. Archimedia/Forth: All partners in WS-Talk had no problem to identify their
role, opportunities, and responsibilities in WS-Talk. For the project management there
was no much reason to delegate task or to intervene. However, our Greek partners,
Archimedia (SME) and Forth-ICS (RTD) unfortunately had problems to identify
themselves with WS-Talk during the first term of the project. The mid-term mentions
the two partners thus as “under-performing” partners.
The conflict between Archimedia, Forth-ICS, and the Project Management has been
eventually solved. A final agreement on the evaluation of the work of these two partners
was reached at during a conflict resolving meeting in Athens in October 2006.
We have to emphasise the effort of both partners in the second half of the project as
well as their results produced in this period clearly show that they cannot be considered
any longer as “under-performing partners”.
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Final Periodic Activity Report, WS-Talk, COOP-CT-2004-6026
Section 4. Other issues
Contributions of SMEs, RTDs, and external partners in WS-Talk
In general, the RTD partners always stood at the beginning of the production chain.
They selected a suitable approach for a given problem of the SME partner. They
developed a first prototypical solution to demonstrate the feasibility of their approach.
SME partners took up these prototypes and developed robust software modules that can
be involved in the respective WS-Talk product.
The roles of the different partners have been outlined in Section 1 and their
contributions are mentioned in detail in Section 2.
The major role of the SME partners was and still is to identify the commercial potential
of the WS-Talk technology and to assess it correctly through close cooperation with a
number of dedicated external companies acting as pilot users.
External Partners
The first pilot users in WS-Talk (adidas (Czech Rep.), Cruz del Sur (Chile), SoluServicios
(Chile), and SPM (Argentina)) contributed their data in order to set company-specific
controlled vocabularies. They cooperate with the respective partners of the consortium
to assess the applicability of the WS-Talk technology within the context of their
organisation and to co-develop an application that is based on WS-Talk results.
Further external pilot users joined the project in the second term: Banco Paris (Chile)
entered a cooperation with Soluciones. Cruz del Sur and SPM cancelled their cooperation
because of a major re-organisation of their companies.
AKRA established a cooperation with NarrNetz (Univ. of Hamburg).
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