Our institute was founded as a spin-off of a University research group in Theoretical Physics that started to use email as early as 1987 and the WWW in 1993. We have been exploring technical online services for the management of scientific information and communication long before the Internet Age had even begun.

We are devoted to the development of concepts promoting the free exchange of ideas. We aim to provide optimal technical support for online publishing processes. Our activities include initiating large-scale strategies, supporting metadata standards, as well as producing software for the publication process for scientific journals. We believe that publication services should always include the needs from various user-groups: While it is paramount to create software covering the scientists’ requirements in their roles as authors and recipients, we specifically encompass the concerns of students as well as project managers, who are in need of a timely and innovative product.

At present, for example, we are working on algorithms for text-analysis and for subject-specific classification of documents, i.e. n-gram analysis, acronym detection, citation extraction, etc. This work actively supports libraries, scientific information services, publishers, and scientific organizations by identifying the most relevant documents in a given discipline. This type of information retrieval extends the possibilities of common search engines and permits fine-tuning of precision and recall values to specific requirements.

We are in close cooperation with the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg. We participate in European and in national research projects, work together with international learned societies. We are active members of several international standardization initiatives.