Sozialdatenschutz — eine Frage des Beschäftigtendatenschutzes?

Im Bereich des Sozialdatenschutzes besteht im Zusammenhang mit dem Besch?ftigtendatenschutz ein gesetzgeberischer Handlungsbedarf. Die Regierungsparteien haben sich im Koalitionsvertrag darauf geeinigt, dass nach Jahren der Diskussion der Besch?ftigtendatenschutz in einem Kapitel des BDSG geregelt werden soll. Hier kann die Frage dahingestellt bleiben, ob nicht eine bereichsspezifische Regelung effektiver w?re. Eine Verbindung zwischen Besch?ftigtendatenschutz und Sozialdatenschutz wurde jedenfalls bisher nicht ins Visier genommen. Eine solche Verknüpfung ist jedoch notwendig, wie die nachfolgend aufgezeigten Konfliktfelder und der nachfolgend geschilderte Fall beispielhaft zeigen. Sie deuten die datenschutzrechtlichen Schwierigkeiten an, die durch das Fehlen eines Besch?ftigtendatenschutzgesetzes für Besch?ftigte im Bereich der Jugendhilfe entstehen k?nnen. Anschlie?end sollen sachgerechte Antworten ausgelotet werden. Sie führen gleichzeitig zu der kritischen Frage nach der Zust?ndigkeit von Aufsichtsbeh?rden und Landesdatenschutzbeauftragten in F?llen, in denen die T?tigkeit ?ffentlicher (hier Jugendamt und Heimaufsicht) und nicht-?ffentlicher Stellen (hier freie Tr?ger der Jugendhilfe) eng aufeinander abgestimmt werden muss.     

A model, a heuristic and a decision support system to solve the scheduling problem of an earth observing satellite constellation

China plans to launch four small optical satellites and four small SAR satellites to form a natural disaster monitoring constellation. Data can be obtained by the constellation in all weather conditions for disaster alert and environmental damage analysis. The scheduling problem for the constellation consists of selecting and timetabling the observation activities to acquire the requested images of the earth surface and scheduling the download activities to transmit the image files to a set of ground stations. The scheduling problem is required to be solved every day in a typical 1-day horizon and it must respect complex satellite operational constraints as well as request preferences, such as visibility time windows, transition time between consecutive observations or downloads, memory capacity, energy capacity, polygon target requests and priorities. The objective is to maximize the rewards of the images taken and transmitted. We present a nonlinear model of the scheduling problem, develop a priority-based heuristic with conflict-avoided, limited backtracking and download-as-needed features, which produces satisfactory feasible plans in a very short time. A decision support system based on the model and the heuristic is also provided. The system performance shows a significant improvement with respect to faster and better scheduling of an earth observing satellite constellation.     

Distributed top-<Emphasis Type="Italic">k</Emphasis> aggregation queries at large

Top-k query processing is a fundamental building block for efficient ranking in a large number of applications. Efficiency is a central issue, especially for distributed settings, when the data is spread across different nodes in a network. This paper introduces novel optimization methods for top-k aggregation queries in such distributed environments. The optimizations can be applied to all algorithms that fall into the frameworks of the prior TPUT and KLEE methods. The optimizations address three degrees of freedom: 1) hierarchically grouping input lists into top-k operator trees and optimizing the tree structure, 2) computing data-adaptive scan depths for different input sources, and 3) data-adaptive sampling of a small subset of input sources in scenarios with hundreds or thousands of query-relevant network nodes. All optimizations are based on a statistical cost model that utilizes local synopses, e.g., in the form of histograms, efficiently computed convolutions, and estimators based on order statistics. The paper presents comprehensive experiments, with three different real-life datasets and using the ns-2 network simulator for a packet-level simulation of a large Internet-style network.     

Externalizing cognitive maps via map reconstruction and verbal description

Universal Access in the Information Society - Helping blind people to build cognitive maps of an environment is one of the aims of several assistive systems. In order to evaluate such assistive...     

XML-enabled workflow management for e-services across heterogeneous platforms

Advanced e-services require efficient, flexible, and easy-to-use workflow technology that integrates well with mainstream Internet technologies such as XML and Web servers. This paper discusses an XML-enabled architecture for distributed workflow management that is implemented in the latest version of our Mentor-lite prototype system. The key asset of this architecture is an XML mediator that handles the exchange of business and flow control data between workflow and business-object servers on the one hand and client activities on the other via XML messages over http. Our implementation of the mediator has made use of Oracle's XSQL servlet. The major benefit of the advocated architecture is that it provides seamless integration of client applications into e-service workflows with scalable efficiency and very little explicit coding, in contrast to an earlier, Java-based, version of our Mentor-lite prototype that required much more code and exhibited potential performance problems. Received: 30 October 2000 / Accepted: 19 December 2000 Published online: 27 April 2001     

Electronic Meeting Support for Councils

City councils hold meetings several times a week. There is a need for computer support at certain meetings. This paper examines the potential for group support systems for use in city council meetings and shows in what ways they can be helpful in pre-meeting and post-meeting activities. The study is based on 17 computer-supported city council meetings, carried out in Stuttgart, Kornwestheim and other cities as part of the Cuparla Project between 1996 and 1998. Three of these meetings are described in the paper as brief case studies. Following this, all 17 meeting sequences are evaluated and analysed. Guidelines have been developed from the results of the study for the introduction of group support systems in city council meetings.