Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures

We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems, where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity). Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa

An approach to Integrated Management System exploiting knowledge base to support business processes management

none6noPaiano, R.; Pandurino, A.; Guido, A.; Ritrovato, P.; D’Apice, C.; Laria, G.Paiano, Roberto; Pandurino, Andrea; Guido, ANNA LISA; Ritrovato, P.; D’Apice, C.; Laria, G

Towards a new approach for enterprise integration : the semantic modeling approach

Manufacturing today has become a matter of the effective and efficient application of information technology and knowledge engineering. Manufacturing firms’ success depends to a great extent on information technology, which emphasizes the integration of the information systems used by a manufacturing enterprise. This integration is also called enterprise application integration (here the term application means information systems or software systems). The methodology for enterprise application integration, in particular enterprise application integration automation, has been studied for at least a decade; however, no satisfactory solution has been found. Enterprise application integration is becoming even more difficult due to the explosive growth of various information systems as a result of ever increasing competition in the software market. This thesis aims to provide a novel solution to enterprise application integration. The semantic data model concept that evolved in database technology is revisited and applied to enterprise application integration. This has led to two novel ideas developed in this thesis. First, an ontology of an enterprise with five levels (following the data abstraction: generalization/specialization) is proposed and represented using unified modeling language. Second, both the ontology for the enterprise functions and the ontology for the enterprise applications are modeled to allow automatic processing of information back and forth between these two domains. The approach with these novel ideas is called the enterprise semantic model approach. The thesis presents a detailed description of the enterprise semantic model approach, including the fundamental rationale behind the enterprise semantic model, the ontology of enterprises with levels, and a systematic way towards the construction of a particular enterprise semantic model for a company. A case study is provided to illustrate how the approach works and to show the high potential of solving the existing problems within enterprise application integration

Collective consciousness and its pathologies: Understanding the failure of AIDS control and treatment in the United States

We address themes of distributed cognition by extending recent formal developments in the theory of individual consciousness. While single minds appear biologically limited to one dynamic structure of linked cognitive submodules instantiating consciousness, organizations, by contrast, can support several, sometimes many, such constructs simultaneously, although these usually operate relatively slowly. System behavior remains, however, constrained not only by culture, but by a developmental path dependence generated by organizational history, in the context of market selection pressures. Such highly parallel multitasking – essentially an institutional collective consciousness – while capable of reducing inattentional blindness and the consequences of failures within individual workspaces, does not eliminate them, and introduces new characteristic malfunctions involving the distortion of information sent between workspaces and the possibility of pathological resilience – dysfunctional institutional lock-in. Consequently, organizations remain subject to canonical and idiosyncratic failures analogous to, but more complicated than, those afflicting individuals. Remediation is made difficult by the manner in which pathological externalities can write images of themselves onto both institutional function and corrective intervention. The perspective is applied to the failure of AIDS control and treatment in the United States