Digital Ecosystems group presenting six papers at IEEE-DEST 2009
Thursday 23 April 2009
The Digital Ecosystems group, led by Professor Paul Krause, has had six papers accepted for presentation at the IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE-DEST 2009). This is one of the most prestigious conferences in the area and the accepted papers cover a wide range of topics showing the strength of the work being done in the group.
Moschoyiannis, S., Krause, P., Bryant, D. & McBurney, P. (2009). Verifiable protocol design for argumentation dialogue protocols. IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE-DEST 2009), Istanbul, Turkey.
We describe a formal approach to protocol design for dialogues between autonomous agents in a digital ecosystem that involve the exchange of arguments between the participants. We introduce a vector language-based representation of argumentation protocols, which captures the interplay between different agents’ moves in a dialogue in a way that (a) determines the legal moves that are available to each participant, in each step, and (b) records the dialogue history. We use UML protocol state machines (PSMs) to model a negotiation dialogue protocol at both the individual participant level (autonomous agent viewpoint) and the dialogue level (overall interaction viewpoint). The underlying vector semantics is used to verify that a given dialogue was played out in compliance with the corresponding protocol.
Marinos, A. & Krause, P. (2009). Using SBVR, REST and Relational Databases to develop Information Systems native to the Digital Ecosystem. IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE-DEST 2009), Istanbul, Turkey.
The model-driven and declarative approach makes semantics and policy integral to the operation of the information system making the individual information system a self-documenting native citizen of the digital ecosystem.
Marinos, A. & Krause, P. (2009). What, not How: A generative approach to service composition. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE-DEST 2009), Istanbul, Turkey.
We argue that the complexity of the WS-* service stack is a barrier to the exploitation of service composition in digital ecosystems (and indeed, quite generally). As an alternative, we focus on the emerging interest in REpresentational State Transfer (REST) as an architectural style, and the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) for the expression of business requirements. We describe an architecture by which declarative service requests can be dynamically generated from a pool of RESTful web services.
Razavi, A., Marinos, A., Moschoyiannis, S. & Krause, P. (2009). Recovery management in RESTful Interactions. IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE-DEST 2009), Istanbul, Turkey.
With REST becoming a dominant architectural paradigm for web services in distributed systems, more and more use cases are applied to it, including use cases that re-quire transactional guarantees. We believe that the loose cou-pling that is supported by RESTful transactions, makes this currently our preferred interaction style for digital ecosystems (DEs). To further expand its value to DEs, we propose a RESTful transaction model that satisfies both the constraints of recoverable transactions and those of the REST architec-tural style. We then show the correctness and applicability of the model.
Briscoe, G. & Marinos, A. (2009). Digital Ecosystems in the Clouds: Towards Community Cloud Computing. IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE-DEST 2009), Istanbul, Turkey.
Cloud Computing is rising fast, with its data centres growing at an unprecedented rate. However, this has come with concerns of privacy, efficiency at the expense of resilience, and environmental sustainability, because of the dependence on Cloud vendors such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Community Cloud Computing makes use of the principles of Digital Ecosystems to provide a paradigm for Clouds in the community, offering an alternative architecture for the use cases of Cloud Computing. It is more technically challenging to deal with issues of distributed computing, such as latency, differential resource management, and additional security requirements. However, these are not insurmountable challenges, and with the need to retain control over our digital lives and the potential environmental consequences, it is a challenge we must pursue.
Krause, P., Razavi, A., Moschoyiannis, S. & Marinos, A. (2009). Stability and Complexity in Digital Ecosystems. IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE-DEST 2009), Istanbul, Turkey.
In this paper we explore the concept of “ecosystem” as a metaphor in the development of the digital economy. We argue that the modelling of social ecosystems as self-organising systems is also relevant to the study of digital ecosystems. Specifically, that centralised control structures in digital ecosystems militate against emergence of innovation and adaptive response to pressures or shocks that may impact the ecosystem. We hope the paper will stimulate a more holistic approach to gaining empirical and theoretical understanding of digital ecosystems.