German Version / Deutsche Version

A successful cooperation between the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich and the SKYTEC AG enhanced Europe’s technological innovative performance: LMU Munich and SKYTEC AG collaborated during 2008-2010 within an IT research project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Focusing on topics such as Social Information Processing and Enterprise 2.0 and employing Semantic Web technologies, both partners strove to boost the search experience of users on the Web.

The product "Xinaps":

The main outcome of the fruitful cooperation between the LMU Munich and SKYTEC AG is an innovative product called Xinaps. The product offers forward-looking means to ease the process of conducting research, regardless whether information sources - such as corporate knowledge bases or the Web - come into play. Xinaps is tailored to the so called knowledge worker, who mainly develops and uses knowledge in the workplace. The product targets primarily management consultants, researchers, and patent attorneys.

Offered in form of a browser plug-in, Xinaps enhances particularly the search experience of users on the Web. With 1 trillion URLs on the Web, finding the appropriate information is often an act of searching the needle in a haystack. Moreover, judging the quality of information encountered on the Web is not as straightforward as one would expect. Both the current information overload and the lack of quality control on the Web hamper an efficient search and call for practical solutions.

Our solution relies on innovation: Xinaps aims at fostering the social behavior of users and, thus, employing the so-called collective intelligence of communities so as to gain substantial improvements in both quality and time during research. In contrast to other products on the market, Xinaps meets the demands of an enterprise solution, such as ensuring companies’ data confidentiality. As such, an Enterprise 2.0 technology is provided, whose full potential is gained in combination with search engines such as Google.