Simone Braun studied Media Systems at the Bauhaus-University Weimar with focus on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Since December 2005 she is researcher at FZI in the research division Information Process Engineering. She is working in the team of Prof. Rudi Studer and the team of Prof. Peter Lockemann within the competence areas Knowledge & Learning and Semantic Technologies. She is further a PhD student of Prof. Rudi Studer.

Her research is focused on informal learning support and community-support for evolving ontologies ("ontology maturing"). She is also interested in agile methods for competence management and the role social structures play in professional collaborations.

These topics she also has been investigating since April 2008 in the FP7 large-scale Integrating Project (IP) MATURE aiming at fostering learning and knowledge maturing processes within and across organizations by providing personal and organizational learning and maturing environments. Within MATURE, she is continuing her work and approach of collaborative ontology development.

She is further involved in the development of SOBOLEO. SOBOLEO is a tool that combines social semantic bookmarking with collaborative lightweight ontology development. It supports the process of ontology maturing (cf. "Ontology Maturing: a Collaborative Web 2.0 Approach to Ontology Engineering").

From 2005 - 2008 she worked in the German BMBF-funded project Im Wissensnetz ("In the Knowledge Web") with the focus on supporting collaborative working processes within the eScience domain rapid prototyping. Within this project, she investigated how to transfer approaches of (business-oriented) knowledge management and work-integrated learning on demand to scientific working processes under special consideration of informal learning processes and social relationships.

In other projects she worked on transferring the concept of work-integrated learning on demand into future releases of SAP ERP software. She was also involved in the conceptualization of a knowledge management strategy for a large German automotive manufacturer.

Teaching:

SS2009: Seminar Technology Enhanced Learning 2.0 (in German)
WS08/09: Seminar on Collective Intelligence
SS2008: Seminar on Technology Enhanced Learning (in German)