lse.uc.uklse.uc.ukThe two overarching aims of the OPAALS Network of Excellence are to build a sustainable interdisciplinary research community in the emerging area of Digital Ecosystems and to develop an integrated theoretical foundation for Digital Ecosystems research, which spans three widely different disciplinary domains: social science, computer science, and natural science. Digital Ecosystems are emerging as a novel approach for the catalysis of regional growth driven by SMEs. SMEs are fundamentally important to the European economy but their rate of adoption of ICT is low, their R&D budgets are severely constrained, and their access to innovation is limited by the dominant IPR environment.
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. Because this process focuses on knowledge and innovation, it must be inclusive of research activities in a broad sense and not be limited just to Open Source software development. Because this processs must be sustainable and scalable it must be recursive and selfreinforcing. It follows that the OPAALS Network of Excellence 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 widely inclusive of all the stakeholders of digital ecosystems but mainly of academic institutions and SMEs. The time scale for this rescursive process is expected to be 1-2 years, so OPAALS can accommodate the first three, progressively expanding phases of growth of the Open Knowledge and Open Source community.
The deeply interdisciplinary nature of OPAALS makes it necessary to confront the fundamental differences in philosophical traditions underpinning the three domains of the project. While the project will adopt a policy of open dialogue and permeable boundaries between the disciplines, at the same time we will build together an Open Knowledge Space that can be “organically” expanded to the wider research community in later project phases. 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. All of the OPAALS research will take inspiration from and eventually lead back to infrastructure deployment in community networks in Italy and India. Finally, we will develop a unifying evolutionary framework for language that will integrate the main types of formal languages under the same self-organisation mechanism that will achieve the adaptability of the software to human users through the main medium of social constructivism: language.
