Description Understanding, Preserving and Predicting the Value of Online Communities.Online communities generate major economic value and form pivotal parts of corporate expertise management, marketing, product support, CRM, product innovation and advertising. Communities can exceed millions of users and infrastructures must support hundreds of millions discussion threads that link together billions of posts. ROBUST is targeted at developing methods to understand and manage the business, social and economic objectives of the users, providers and hosts and to meet the challenges of scale and growth in large communities. The outcome of ROBUST finds its application in online communities in internet, extranet and intranet settings addressing customer support, knowledge sharing, and hosting services. In ROBUST the developed methods are evaluated in live industrial testbeds from of our partners SAP, IBM and Polecat to provide practical grounding and to assess project success. Results are integrated into software solutions and services of partners as well as an open source demonstrator to  be released to the public.