Our research

Digital Ecosystems are emerging as a novel approach for the catalysis of sustainable regional development driven by Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Digital Ecosystems are undoubtedly an important future development of the Internet, breaking it free from legacy systems that are based on centralised servers and require strict conformance to prescriptive processes and interfaces.

The OPAALS project

The two overarching aims of OPAALS are to build an interdisciplinary research community in the emerging area of Digital Ecosystems (DE), and to develop an integrated theoretical foundation for Digital Ecosystems research spanning three widely different disciplinary domains: social science, computer science, and natural science. Together, these two aims will result in a global Network of Excellence (NoE) in digital Ecosystems. 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.

An Open Knowledge Space

Our networking strategy is based on the development of an Open Knowledge Space (OKS). This is an online space in which researchers can freely and easily contribute and exchange knowledge and perform functions in support of their research. The OPAALS OKS 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 potentially inclusive of all the stakeholders of digital Ecosystems but mainly of academic institutions and SMEs.

Integrating existing work

We will integrate the research outputs in automatic code generation, dynamic P2P networks, and distributed accountability, identity and trust into the existing infrastructure from the DBE Integrated 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 Digital Ecosystems on the main medium of social constructivism: language.