Ralph Cimander, qualified engineer of Spatial Planning, is researcher in the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, University of Bremen, since the end of 2001. He is staff of the Institute for Information Management Bremen GmbH (ifib). After his training for electronics engineer, he studied spatial planning at the University of Dortmund and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) with the emphasis on city planning and participation on the Internet. His work in Bremen included a survey on back-office reorganisation on behalf of the European Commission and the Study on Interoperability at Local and Regional Level in the framework of the European Commission's Modinis Programme. Besides being project manager in a market validation study for the transfer of an electronic procurement platform to European regions within the eTEN programme of the EC, he currently is partner in a research project on organisational interoperability and interoperation, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).