Social computing for the public facility management in Berlin
Vladimir Stantchev · International Journal of Social and Humanistic Computing · 2010
Berlin is a major European city with a vast network of public services institutions. These institutions are located at a number of public buildings ranging from small community centres and police stations to court buildings and police training polygons. Overall office space is approx. 20,000 m². In 2003 the Berlin Senate founded the 'Landesbetrieb fur Gebaudebewirtschaftung' (LfG) as a state-owned enterprise that is responsible for all facility management activities related to state-owned real estates. In 2005 the LfG started a joint research project with the Berlin Institute of Technology (TU Berlin) with the aim of introducing novel information technologies (IT), social computing approaches and facility management applications to better support these activities. This article presents our social computing approach in the context of the distributed system architecture. It includes a distributed computing environment, mobile clients and centralised processing systems which integrate ERP applications.