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The world has moved through various phases from the Stone age, Agriculture age, Industrial age through to the Information age. Now we are right into the Digital age, where the digital networked economy dominates our lives and appears to be with us for a long time to come.
This Digital Paradigm is characterised by the advent of internet technologies, where we started from the initial hyperlinked web sites, to progress towards pervasive internet applications. In the last few years, we have seen the advent of Peer-to-Peer systems and Grid networks, where no centralised control unit is necessary. Also, the emergence of Web Service technology has provided a sound basis for e-Services which, in turn, have become a major theme for business process digitalisation. The service-oriented view integrates the concepts of ‘centralised’ and ‘loosely coupled’ into a single unified framework through the provision of a middleware framework. On top of it, we are seeing an increasing use of Agent technology on the internet, both mobile agents, as well as software agents in developing Social Networks.
A key issue that has started to manifest itself is the coalescing of key domains and their activities with the internet. This has led to a new paradigm, which is Social Networking, that takes Agent Paradigms one step further toward supporting dynamic coalitions which are becoming the primary drivers of the internet. We are moving beyond agents that act either independently or autonomously, or purely through dependence on other agents to fulfil more complex tasks utilising notions of social dependence. Now, Agents observe the behaviour of each other and, based on that behaviour, rate the quality of information, output and outcome that is coming from that Agent. This is the crucial factor that defines the Social Networks as opposed to the networks of socially dependent agents.
The next generation of the internet will pull together a number of the previously existing paradigms towards an approach of self-organisation, leading to ad-hoc communities which are domain specific, demand driven, or application centric. This approach called Digital Ecosystem represents a quantum leap to the next generation of the internet, and has been chosen as a key strategic issue for European research.
The Digital Ecosystem approach should not be confused with the use of digital technology to support environmental or biological ecosystems. Digital Ecosystems represent groups within the Digital Space which have the characteristics of an ecosystem and these characteristics include loosely coupled individuals coming together to form temporary coalitions or more permanent coalitions, where there is a benefit to the individuals. They self-organise in the way they interact with each other. They are frequently domain centric. The groups within these ecosystems are often referred to as species. Each species may use a different communication infrastructure to another species in Digital Ecosystem. This new paradigm, originally put forward in the European Union, is now being recognised by the IEEE, which represent the North American input. It is also an important paradigm for the Asia Pacific area, with the recent service industry success in India and manufacturing success in China. This is reflected in Australia, a major player in the Asia-Pacific area, being chosen as the site for this first conference.
The advantage of Digital Ecosystems is that we are going to merge a lot of features and ideas for further developing service oriented environments, not just match the service providers for service delivery to service recipients, but bringing in the element of Social Networks in the way it uses Agent Technology. This will carry Agent Technology to the next stage in being adaptive and self-organising with respect to the way the agent is functioning. They will not just have a single fixed static function, which is predefined but have the possibility of evolving functions and roles that each agent can perform and offer to other agents or the specific digital community.
We have been highly successful in attracting eminent speakers for keynotes including:
Professor Ian Somerville, a world Eminent Professor in Software Engineering from St. Andrews University, United Kingdom who will give a keynote on ‘Design for Failure: Software Engineering Challenges of Digital Ecosystems’
Ambassador-at-large Chuan-Leong Lam, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Singapore who will give a keynote on ‘The Singapore Infocomm Technology (ICT) System as a Form of Digital Eco-Economic System’.
Dr. Paolo Dini from the London School of Economics and Political Science who originally formulated the business notions underlying ecosystem application. He offers a keynote on the ‘Structure and Outlook of Digital Ecosystems Research’.
Department of Defence (DoD), Canberra, Australia, Boris Novak, Jane MacMaster and Mike Kalms, who will provide a plenary speech on ‘The RPDE Organisation: A Digital Ecosystem in the Australian Defence Sector’.
The Honourable Dr. Mal Bryce AO, Chairman, WA ICT Forum, Western Australia Technology and Industry Advisory Council, will provide a keynote on ‘Telecommunications: Key Infrastructure for the Digital Revolution and the Global Knowledge Economy’.
Professor David Wood, Executive Dean of Humanities at Curtin University of Technology, Australia, will provide a plenary presentation on ‘Eco-Tourists, Eco-Tourism and Eco-Environments: A Social, Cultural and Economic Impact’.
The very fact we that have been able to attract such eminent speakers, underlines the importance of this conference’s themes.
This conference represents the first step towards maturity in Digital Ecosystem Technology. We are overwhelmed by the response to this first conference. We received over 140 papers and selected 70 papers for presentation. For the first conference, this is a big step forward, and this conference will be part of a series into the future.
Some of the themes of the conference are:
- Infrastructures for Digital Ecosystems
- Self Organisation of Digital Ecosystems
- Digital Business Ecosystems
- E-learning Ecosystems
- Health Ecosystems
- e-Humanities and Social Networks
- Trust and Risk in Digital Ecosystems
- Security and Privacy in Digital Ecosystems
- Service Oriented Architectures for Digital Ecosystems
- Digital Business Ecosystems for Small Medium Enterprises
- Digital Ecosystems Technology
It is important to remember that these themes represent not only our vision of Digital Ecosystems, but (in the true spirit of the ecosystem approach) it also represents the way the papers submitted aligned themselves.
The conference Chairs would like to take this opportunity to thank the sponsors of the conference, namely: IEEE IES, Embassy of Italy in Canberra, the Information Technology Department of the University of Milan, Curtin University of Technology and the University Technology Sydney, Department of Defence and Queensland Government DPI&F. The conference Chairs also sincerely acknowledge the local conference coordinator, Sonya Rosbotham and the Digital Ecosystems and Business Intelligence Institute at Curtin University for their dedicated efforts in supporting the entire conference organisation.
We welcome you to a very exciting intellectual occasion where we will exchange ideas and information and debate issues, and will help provide input into the next generation of computing and the internet. |
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