An ontology supporting planning, analysis, and simulation of evolving digital ecosystems

Abstract

Digital Ecosystems (DEs) are interwoven networks of Digital Objects (DOs), policies, processes, services and user communities, within constantly changing and interacting environments. Their complex grown structures can be difficult to maintain and it can be hard to foresee the impact of planned and unplanned change. The PERICLES EU FP7 project developed the Digital Ecosystem Model (DEM), an ontology to model those complex DEs for supporting their maintenance and preservation. It provides concepts to express dependencies, provenance and analysis. Planned or unplanned changes to a DE represented via the DEM can be simulated in advance to analyse and mitigate risks, and to assure the quality of the DE architecture. PERICLES developed the EcoBuilder tool to support scenario experts in modelling aspects of interests of their DEs with the DEM for further investigation and maintenance. The DEM can be extended by domain specific ontologies to support various use cases of different domains, e.g. the digital media and art domains for which specialised ontologies [10] are developed in PERICLES. This approach supports documentation of the entities and their environments not only for preservation purposes, but also for the management of environmental drift in a wider range of domains, such as the digital ecosystems of Internet of Things (IoT), which we used as example in this paper.