Michael Dorner

Software Engineering

Open Science

Software Engineering

Open Science

Prozedurale Programmierung

Objektorientierte Programmierung

Advanced Software Engineering

Research Software Engineering

Below you will find a selection of example topics for student theses. I supervise these topics at both Bachelor’s and Master’s level, with scope and depth adapted accordingly. I also offer additional thesis topics in the areas of software engineering and open science. If you are interested, please contact me.

• Comparative Analysis of Open Bibliographic Metadata Sources: Systematic comparison of coverage, update dynamics, licensing, and structural limitations of open metadata sources (e.g. Crossref, OpenAlex, institutional repositories) as a basis for transparent publication infrastructure.
• Modeling Version Relationships Between Scientific Publications: Conceptual and technical analysis of how Preprints, Postprints, and Versions of Record can be represented and linked using metadata and content-based fingerprints.
• Energy-Aware Design of Document Indexing Pipelines: Exploration of architectural patterns for document ingestion and indexing with respect to storage footprint and energy consumption.
• Transparency of Ranking Mechanisms in Scholarly Search Systems: Analysis of publicly observable ranking behavior in scholarly search tools and derivation of transparency criteria for infrastructure design.
• Copyright Constraints on Automated Processing of Scientific Publications: Analysis of copyright limitations and exceptions relevant for text mining, indexing, and version comparison in open publication infrastructures.
• Legal Status of Bibliographic Metadata and Citation Data: Examination of database rights and reuse conditions for bibliographic metadata in open infrastructures.
• Design Principles for Transparent and Reproducible Scholarly Search Infrastructure: Derivation, formalization, and evaluation of architectural and algorithmic design principles enabling reproducible search and ranking.
• Hybrid Identification of Scientific Publications Using Metadata and Content Fingerprinting: Design and evaluation of methods combining semantic metadata and document fingerprints to identify and relate publication versions.
• Prototypical Implementation of an Open Publication Graph: Development of a research prototype modeling publications, versions, citations, and provenance as an open, inspectable graph structure.
• Evaluation Framework for Scientific Publication Infrastructure: Development of criteria and metrics to evaluate transparency, reproducibility, souvereign, and sustainability of publication infrastructures.
• Energy and Resource Efficiency in Digital Knowledge Infrastructures: Systematic investigation of architectural trade-offs between functionality, storage, computation, and energy consumption.
• Legal Design Patterns for Open Scholarly Infrastructure> Identification and evaluation of legally robust design patterns for metadata harvesting, document processing, and open dissemination.
• Governance Models for Open, Institutionally Controlled Publication Infrastructure: Comparative analysis of governance structures from open-source software, research infrastructures, and library consortia.

For technical theses, I recommend proficiency in Go, Postgres, and/or Python and a strong software engineering background. Familiarity with distributed systems, databases, or natural language processing is a plus. All theses are written in English.