The development of a Digital Product Passport (DPP) is an important step in the process of sustainable production and an increasingly mandatory tool for the manufacturing industry, particularly in the EU. However, DPPs have so far been understood in the industry as a purely technical implementation for the exchange of relevant data toward product manufacturing, which is not suitable for reading and understanding by humans. This paper, therefore, describes an approach for a visual analytics system that enables human decision making through the visualization and analysis of DPPs, with a particular focus on optimizing CO2efficiency. The system uses intuitive analytical visualizations to enable quick understanding and actionable insights. The main contribution is the concrete data processing and visualization of DPP information for human access, and is so far one of the first available approaches for a visual representation of DPPs in general.

Smart Manufacturing is currently the main objective when production manufacturers digitalize their plants to face current regulations and requirements to optimize costs, consumed resources, and sustainability. The focus is usually on extracting data from production and making it "analyzable". However, the results often neglect advanced options to optimize the production, may it in regards to the production process itself or in regards to consumed resources of the produced goods in specific. As the main contribution, this paper describes a novel approach to consider process mining appending to plant digitization and IoT analytics. As a result, the entire production process becomes transparent and therewith analyzable, but also the concrete consumed resources per produced good, per group, or as a whole can be analyzed. As the application benefit, the paper also outlines some advanced analysis capabilities to identify production optimizations based on process mining.

Abstract The awareness of emerging trends is essential for strategic decision making because technological trends can affect a firm’s competitiveness and market position. The rise of artificial intelligence methods allows gathering new insights and may support these decision-making processes. However, it is essential to keep the human in the loop of these complex analytical tasks, which, often lack an appropriate interaction design. Including special interactive designs for technology and innovation management is therefore essential for successfully analyzing emerging trends and using this information for strategic decision making. A combination of information visualization, trend mining and interaction design can support human users to explore, detect, and identify such trends. This paper enhances and extends a previously published first approach for integrating, enriching, mining, analyzing, identifying, and visualizing emerging trends for technology and innovation management. We introduce a novel interaction design by investigating the main ideas from technology and innovation management and enable a more appropriate interaction approach for technology foresight and innovation detection.

Visual Analytics enables solving complex analytical tasks by coupling interactive visualizations and machine learning approaches. Besides the analytical reasoning enabled through Visual Analytics, the exploration of data plays an essential role. The exploration process can be supported through similarity-based approaches that enable finding similar data to those annotated in the context of visual exploration. We propose in this paper a process of annotation in the context of exploration that leads to labeled vectors-of-interest and enables finding similar publications based on interest vectors. The generation and labeling of the interest vectors are performed automatically by the Visual Analytics system and lead to finding similar papers and categorizing the annotated papers. With this approach, we provide a categorized similarity search based on an automatically labeled interest matrix in Visual Analytics.

Scientific publications are an essential resource for detecting emerging trends and innovations in a very early stage, by far earlier than patents may allow. Thereby Visual Analytics systems enable a deep analysis by applying commonly unsupervised machine learning methods and investigating a mass amount of data. A main question from the Visual Analytics viewpoint in this context is, do abstracts of scientific publications provide a similar analysis capability compared to their corresponding full-texts? This would allow to extract a mass amount of text documents in a much faster manner. We compare in this paper the topic extraction methods LSI and LDA by using full text articles and their corresponding abstracts to obtain which method and which data are better suited for a Visual Analytics system for Technology and Corporate Foresight. Based on a easy replicable natural language processing approach, we further investigate the impact of lemmatization for LDA and LSI. The comparison will be performed qualitative and quantitative to gather both, the human perception in visual systems and coherence values. Based on an application scenario a visual trend analytics system illustrates the outcomes.

The awareness of emerging technologies is essential for strategic decision making in enterprises. Emerging and decreasing technological trends could lead to strengthening the competitiveness and market positioning. The exploration, detection and identification of such trends can be essentially supported through information visualization, trend mining and in particular through the combination of those. Commonly, trends appear first in science and scientific documents. However, those documents do not provide sufficient information for analyzing and identifying emerging trends. It is necessary to enrich data, extract information from the integrated data, measure the gradient of trends over time and provide effective interactive visualizations. We introduce in this paper an approach for integrating, enriching, mining, analyzing, identifying and visualizing emerging trends from scientific documents. Our approach enhances the state of the art in visual trend analytics by investigating the entire analysis process and providing an approach for enabling human to explore undetected potentially emerging trends.

Nowadays a wide range of input devices are available to users of technical systems. Especially modern alternative interaction devices, which are known from game consoles etc., provide a more natural way of interaction. In parallel to that the research on visualization of large amount of data advances very quickly. This research was also influenced by the semantic web and the idea of storing data in a structured and linked form. The semantically annotated data gains more and more importance in information acquisition processes. Especially the Linked Open Data (LOD) format already experienced a huge growth. However, the user-interfaces of web-applications mostly do not reflect the added value of semantics data. This paper describes the conceptual design and implementation of an Interactive Exploration System that offers a user-centered graphical environment of web-based knowledge repositories, to support and optimize explorative learning, and the integration of a taxonomy-based approach to enable the use of more natural interaction metaphors, as they are possible with modern devices like Wii Mote or Microsoft Kinect. Therefore we introduce a different classification for interaction devices, and current approaches for supporting the added values in semantics visualizations. Furthermore, we describe the concept of our IES, including a strategy to organize and structure today's existing input devices, and a semantics exploration system driven by user-experience. We conclude the paper with a description of the implementation of the IES and an application scenario.