OPAALS: Open philosophies for associative autopoietic digital ecosystems

OPAALS is a global Network of Excellence formed around multi-disciplinary research into Digital Ecosystems. OPAALS research covers social science, linguistics, computer science, software engineering, and biology.

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 two overarching aims of the OPAALS Project 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.