Wissenschaftliche Publikationen

A Semantic MatchMaking Framework for Volunteering MarketPlaces

J. Schönböck, J. Altmann, E. Kapsamer, B. Pröll, W. Retschitzegger, W. Schwinger – A Semantic MatchMaking Framework for Volunteering MarketPlaces – Trends and Advances in Information Systems and Technologies, Neapel, Italien, 2018, pp. 10

Abstract

Volunteering is an omnipresent cornerstone of our society. Currently, new forms of volunteering like crowd workers, engagement hoppers or patchwork volunteers are arising. This next-generation volunteers more than ever demand for volunteering marketplaces providing adequate MatchMaking capabilities. This paper proposes a semantic MatchMaking framework allowing to compute a ranked list of tasks or volunteers whose profiles match “as closely as possible”. For this, an ontology-based vocabulary is established which explicitly captures the multifaceted nature of profiles for both, tasks and volunteers. Each of these facets is associated with adequate similarity measures and meta information explicitly capturing domain expertise. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated by a simple example and a first prototype.

A Semantic MatchMaking Framework for Volunteering MarketPlacesHerunterladen

IVOLUNTEER – A Digital Ecosystem for Life-long Volunteering

E. Kapsamer, E. Kimmerstorfer, B. Pröll, W. Retschitzegger, W. Schwinger, J. Schönböck, N. Dürk, G. Rossi, S. Gordillo – IVOLUNTEER – A Digital Ecosystem for Life-long Volunteering – Proceedings of iiWAS2017, Salzburg, Österreich, 2017, pp. 366-373

Abstract

Volunteering is an indispensable cornerstone of our society, covering nearly every part of our life, from social care to emergency management and education. This omnipresence of volunteering led to a plethora of volunteer management systems (VMS), mainly supporting NPOs in scheduling and allocating tasks to volunteers. In contrast to this NPO-centric approach of existing VMS, we focus on volunteers by investigating the following core question: “How can the engagement of volunteers be digitized and exploited in a life-long way”. To provide a first step towards answering this question, the contribution of this paper is threefold. First, an in-depth study of related approaches is provided identifying shortcomings but also promising concepts. Second, challenges which have to be tackled to deal with the broad spectrum and peculiarities of volunteering are identified and a vision for a next-generation VMS called iVolunteer is pointed out. Third, promising technologies are identified and discussed in detail to lay the basis for the technical architecture of our envisioned iVolunteer-prototype.

A Survey on Volunteer Management Systems

J. Schönböck, M. Raab, J. Altmann, E. Kapsammer, A. Kusel, B. Pröll, W. Retschitzegger, W. Schwinger – A Survey on Volunteer Management Systems – Proceedings of 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-49), Hawaii, Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika, 2016, pp. 767-776

Abstract

Voluntary work is indispensable in nearly every area of today’s society, e.g., service activities in health care or emergencies. Not least because of this omnipresence of volunteering, already a plethora of volunteer management systems (VMS) has emerged, trying to support diverse volunteering processes and to deal with the broad spectrum and peculiarities of voluntary work. Thus, an in-depth understanding of functional commonalities and differences of VMS is urgently needed. The goal of this paper is therefore to provide an in-depth survey of existing VMS. For this, first, an initial attempt towards a reference model (RM) for VMS is presented, capturing their basic functional ingredients and interrelationships in terms of UML class diagrams. Second, the RM is operationalized by means of a set of evaluation criteria used to compare seven carefully selected VMS, thereby discussing their peculiarities and shortcomings. Third, lessons learned are provided together with research directions for future VMS.