Objective
Digital Ecosystems are emerging as a novel approach for the catalysis of sustainable regional development driven by SMEs. The two overarching aims of the OPAALS NoE are to build an interdisciplinary research community in the emerging area of Digital Ecosystems, and to develop an integrated theoretical foundation for Digital Ecosystems research spanning three widely different disciplinary domains: social science, computer science, and natural science.
The main claim that OPAALS makes is that in order to achieve sustainable digital business ecosystems of SMEs and software components we need to understand in depth the collaborative processes and ICTs that underpin the continuous creation, formalisation, and sharing of knowledge in the form of business models, software infrastructure for e-Business transactions, and new formal and semi-formal languages. Our strategy is based on the development of an Open Knowledge Space. Because this process must be sustainable and scalable it must be recursive and self-reinforcing. It follows that OPAALS is the first step in a recursive, reflexive, and self-reinforcing community building process that will culminate at the end of the project with an Open Knowledge community of research and innovation inclusive of all the stakeholders of digital ecosystems but mainly of academic institutions and SMEs. We will integrate the research outputs in automatic code generation, autopoietic P2P networks, and distributed accountability, identity and trust into the existing infrastructure from the DBE project.
These technical and scientific research activities will be balanced by research in the role of formal and semi-formal languages in epistemic communities and in new Open Source models emerging in public and commercial projects. Finally, we will develop a unifying evolutionary framework for language in order to base the evolutionary and adaptation characteristics of the digital ecosystems on the main medium of social constructivism: language.
Field of science
- /natural sciences/computer and information sciences/software
- /natural sciences/biological sciences/ecology/ecosystems
- /social sciences/economics and business
Funding Scheme
NoE - Network of ExcellenceCoordinator
London
United Kingdom
Participants (14)
38100 Trento
Puch Bei Hallein
208016 Kanpur
01046-000 Sao Paulo
Kigali
00184 Roma
33720 Tampere
08950 Esplugues De Llobregat (Barcelona)
DD1 4HN Dundee
GU2 7XH Guildford
Kassel
B42 2SU Birmingham
Limerick
Waterford