Digital Ecosystems: Principles and Semantics

Digital ecosystems transcend the traditional, rigorously defined, collaborative environments from centralised, distributed or hybrid models into an open, flexible, domain cluster, demand-driven, interactive environment. A digital ecosystem is a newly networked architecture and collaborative environment that addresses the weakness of client-server, peer-to-peer, grid, and Web services. In this paper we provide an explanation of digital ecosystems, their analogy to ecological systems, architecture, swarm intelligence, and comparison to existing networked architecture. We then describe how digital ecosystems can benefit from semantic Web ontologies and rules. Finally, we discuss issues in the collaboration between semantically neighbouring digital ecosystems.