>> www.fernuni-hagen.de With its 72,000 students, the University of Hagen – FUH is the biggest university in Germany. It is the centre for distance collaborative teaching and learning as well as for research and development in virtual communities, including the development and use of respective infrastructural application solutions. FUH is a university of the future for a world of tomorrow. FUH’s Multimedia and Internet Applications research group in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, led by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Matthias Hemmje, conducts research on Virtual Information and Knowledge Environments with special focus on distributed collaborative digital libraries, multimedia archives, information retrieval, filtering, linking, enrichment, personalization, and information visualization. The group is building on research expertise from a long standing history in national and European projects. The newer projects driving the research and expertise are DPE (Digital Preservation Europe), SHAMAN (Sustaining Heritage Access through Multivalent Archiving) and Smart Vortex (Scalable Semantic Product Data Stream Management for Collaboration and Decision Making in Engineering).