The concept of ambient intelligence is a vision where humans are surrounded by computing and networking technology unobtrusively embedded in their surroundings . Especially it characterizes a new paradigm for the interaction between a person and his everyday environment: Ambient Intelligence (AmI) enables this environment to become aware of the human that interacts with it, his goals and needs.

Multimodality allows adaption of human-computer interaction on two different levels: on the one hand different users with different abilities can interact with information technology through multiple modes beyond the traditional keyboard and mouse (e.g. voice, gesture, gaze, etc.) . On the other hand output can be adapted to user context within different environments, e.g. in the car, in the living room, in the office. Tangible User Interface is a new emerging concept which refers to a user interface allowing a person to interact with digital information through the manioulation of the physical environment.

Multimedia Information Retrieval refers to the analysis, indexing and retrieval of multimedia information (text, images, videos, etc.). Knowledge Management comprises a range of practices used to identify, represent, model and visualise knowledge.

Document Engineering is evolving as a new scientific discipline for specifying, designing, and implementing systems belonging to very different business domains by using XML technology. Model-Driven Architecture proposes a comprehensive approach for modeling a system by providing support for platform dependent and independent models as well as facilities to formalize new, domain specific, modeling languages .