Dissertation Online

The project Dissertation Online funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Dfg) is a co-operation of the Humboldt-Universität Berlin, Gerhard-Mercator-University Duisburg, University Erlangen-Nürnberg and Carl von Ossietzky-University Oldenburg and of the main libraries in Germany. The project creates criteria for digital publishing of dissertations in Germany.

There are many open problems to be solved:

	different disciplines need different document structures
	for retrieval designated meta information is needed
	questions of copyright have to be solved
	authentication and unchangeability must be guaranteed
	and much more (see the Dissertation Online homepage - but it's in German language)

It is also desirable to exploit the multimedia capabilities of digital publications.

JavaView has been selected for the online version of a mathematical sample dissertation that demonstrates the possibilities to valorize a PhD thesis with interactive components.

Look here for the sample dissertation by Tim Hoffman, Technical University Berlin which was enhanced with online experiments by Eike Preuß and him. Loading may take a while (about 1 MB of Java archives and TeX fonts must be loaded).
Be sure to have Java enabled! See system prerequisites to run Java applets.