Modeling of Digital Ecosystems: Challenges and Opportunities

Digital ecosystems is a metaphor inspired by natural ecosystems which describes a set of distributed, adaptive, and open socio-technical systems. Being parts of such ecosystems, individual persons, public and private organisations are becoming increasingly dependent on each other. When such cooperation moves beyond simple buying and selling of goods and well-defined services, there is a need for a flexible infrastructure that supports not only information exchange, but also collaborative knowledge creation, evolution and sharing across a number of cooperation and collaborative networks that traditionally work in a bottom-up and rather improvised way. We will in this paper look at how techniques and approaches to modelling used e.g. for enterprise architecture and collaborative networks should evolve to support the development, support and evolution of digital ecosystems.