Enhancing connectivity in digital ecosystems

Tuesday 16 December 2008

Cooperation and Connectivity in Digital Ecosystems

“Ecosystems in nature have always excited interest and been studied for a long time – a natural ecosystem is understood as an interactive system established between living creatures and the environment in which they live (Arthur Tansley, 1871-1955). Members of an ecosystem benefit from each others’ participation, even if the benefits are not so obvious in the first instance. Studies of biodiversity indicate that the respective populations in a predator-pray relationship tend towards a stable attractor. In the era of the Knowledge Economy interest in the value network, rather than the value chain, has increased and opened up the space for considering concepts observed in living organisms that appear in studies of biodiversity. In this thinking, enterprises and business relationships are modelled as living, autopoietic networks.

In talking about Digital Ecosystems we make an analogy to an environment defined by a socio-economic context whose members are software artefacts, be they components, applications, information sources or businesses. In the light of the ever increasing complexity of modern software which is often expected to perform previously unrelated functions, and the need for software applications that are highly concurrent and distributed, it seems useful to pursue this analogy further. A digital ecosystem is a self-organising digital infrastructure aimed at creating an environment for networked organisations that supports cooperation, knowledge sharing, the development of open and adaptive technologies, and evolutionary business models. Some of the characteristics found in natural ecosystems, such as the absence of a central point of command and control, the increased diversity, and the dynamic interrelationship between participants and the environment, are relevant to the software world and the inherent properties exhibited by an ecosystem are desirable in various settings.

In a business setting, sustainable economic growth (or survival) is a common denominator for small, medium and large organisations. In order to achieve sustainable digital business ecosystems, an appropriate software infrastructure for e-business transactions is required, together with new formal and semi-formal languages that enable open and trusted collaborations between small, medium, and large enterprises to ensure their sustainability in an (ultimately global) Digital Ecosystem. This entails a move away from traditional centralised solutions for transaction modelling, and towards fully distributed solutions. With this comes a demand for a purely distributed network whose topology continuously evolves to reflect its usage by the participating entities.
This track within this year's IEEE-DEST conference is concerned with the development of transaction models to facilitate B2B collaboration in digital ecosystems and the design of the most effective underlying network topologies required to support both business and knowledge service composition. The aim is to understand the ways in which networks of collaborations generate value in different, mutually beneficial, ways, including both tangible and intangible assets.”