Tuesday, 7 August 2007
What am (was) I doing in these projects?
Web services are the fundamental elements Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) which emerges as the major paradigm for developing applications/solutions. They are loosely-coupled and can be composed to create more complex blocks of services. In the business terminology, these services must be performed in unison to accomplish a goal which is called transaction. The long-term nature of business transactions, in a highly dynamic and distributed environment, is the major challenge for constructing/defining a consistent transaction model. Disregarding the primary characteristics of SOC (ex. loose-coupling) or ignoring some important business requirements (ex. partial results), are important exertions in proposed transaction models, which also suffer from unnecessary complications of implementing a consistency model on top of the service-realisation boundary. In addition, the feasibility of a heavy coordinator framework misleads some transaction models to use a centralised (or limited decentralised) coordination model. Our model, by introducing a consistency graph for a transaction (IDG) tries to implement a distributed coordinator model in which a transaction can be performed through the cooperation (sharing of results) of the local coordinators. Furthermore, the possibility for realising partial results between different transactions is considered by introducing an External Dependency Graph, which in combination with the IDG can provide a global consistency model. On the localised design of the coordinator we introduce five new locks which not only provide consistency connection between the distributed logs (EDG and IDG) and the local concurrency control model but also cover dynamic aspects of the highly dynamic environment and isolate recovery management.
On OPAALS, our main goal is designing a Dynamic P2P architectures for distributed long-lived transactions:
Our research hypothesis is that in order to do this, we must move away from “traditional” centralised solutions for P2P architectures and transactional modelling, to fully distributed solutions. In keeping with the spirit of OPAALS our P2P architecture proposals derive much of their inspiration from studies of networks of interaction and collaboration in the social and natural sciences. In particular the P2P network model can be viewed as an example of a birth (node duplication with divergence), death (node inactivation or removal), and innovation (horizontal “gene” transfer) model (BDIM). What we are aiming for here, is the development of a digital environment that evolves naturally to support a sustainable economy, where interactions through e-commerce are an integral part of that economy…
Some references:
- A. Razavi, S. Moschoyiannis and P. Krause. Concurrency Control and Recovery Management for Open e-Business Transactions. In Proc. of Communicating Process Architectures (CPA 2007), 2007.
- A. Razavi, S. Moschoyiannis and P. Krause. A Coordination Model for Distributed Transactions in Digital Business Ecosystems. In Proc. of IEEE Int'l Conf. on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE-DEST 2007), IEEE Computer Society, 2007. [preliminary version: PDF]
- A. Razavi, P. Malone, S. Moschoyiannis, B. Jennings and P. Krause. A Distributed Transaction and Accounting Model for Digital Ecosystem Composed Services. In Proc. of IEEE Int'l Conf. on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE-DEST 2007), IEEE Computer Society, 2007. [preliminary version: PDF]
- A. Razavi, S. Moschoyiannis and P. J. Krause Preliminary Architecture for Autopoietic P2P Network focusing on Hierarchical Super-Peers, Birth and Growth Models. OPAALS project Deliverable D3.1, 2007
- A. R. Razavi, P. J .Krause and S. K. Moschoyiannis. DBE Report D24.5: DBE Distributed Transaction Model, University of Surrey, 2006.
Labels: What I am doing here
Saturday, 4 August 2007
What is OPAALS?
OPAALS is a research Network of Excellence funded under the European Union’s 6th Framework Programme for Research and Development.
An open, global network, its main aims are to develop an integrated theoretical foundation for digital ecosystems research and a sustainable and open community of research. This is characterised by a radically interdisciplinary research agenda combined with the emergence of a new paradigm that requires the development of new ways of working across disciplinary boundaries, in particular between social science, computer science, and natural science.
The OPAALS network will support the on-going trend toward the extension of traditional disciplines into new disciplines. We are taking inspiration from the Open Source community process to create the conditions whereby an Open Knowledge community of research can form and grow. Because an open-source community is already forming around projects in the EU’s Digital Ecosystems Cluster, our efforts will start from this common overlap and extend toward the natural, physical and social sciences through ever wider inclusion of academic and industrial partners who wish to collaborate on the research.
Theoretical foundation for digital ecosystems | Robustness, sustainability, and scalability of digital ecosystems and of their user communities |
Integration of different disciplinary viewpoints | Methodologies for adoption of useful concepts from other disciplines |
Initiate recursive, reflexive, and self-reinforcing knowledge creation and community building process | Scalability of OPAALS NoE into wider Open Knowledge community of research |
Definition, construction, and visualisation of Open Knowledge Space Model | Long-term memory of OPAALS community, access, retrieval, reuse, collaboration, visibility, dissemination, community identity |
Sustainable Open Source/Knowledge models | Maximise knowledge sharing and innovation among SMEs, free from IPR constraints |
Dynamic P2P architectures for distributed long-lived transactions, accountability, identiy trust | Enable automatic aggregation and combination of services in digital ecosystems |
Context-dependent automatic code generation from natural language models | Lower ICT adoption barriers, raise software engineering implementation to architectural specification |
Biological, mathematical and formal models for the conservation of autopoiesis in biological and software systems | Provide theoretical background and models |
Labels: OPAALS
What is DBE?
The Digital Business Ecosystem concept emerged worldwide as an innovative approach to support the adoption and development of ICT. This concept, which has been coined initially in 2002 in Europe, aims at implementing the ambitious objectives set at Lisbon Council: higher growth, more and better jobs and greater social inclusion, keeping in mind the peculiarities of the European development, mostly based on a diffuse network of SMEs and local innovation systems.
Today, whilst even the most extensive centralised software environments have the ambition to form "Digital Ecosystems", the European vision of Digital Ecosystems is becoming mature. Following the pioneering work and the preliminary achievements,
The Digital Business Ecosystem topic has been included in the FP7 Framework Programme, in i2010, in the i2010 local agendas.
but is not included in the topic of the the first two years of the ICT-FP7 implementation, described in the Workprogramme 2007-2008.
The Workprogramme 2009-2010 will be started to be drafted in the second half of 2007.
DBE Documentation
- The DBE Project: an Introduction: Paolo Dini, Andrea Nicolai DBE - The Digital Business Ecosystem (an introduction)
- The DBE Project: The Science Vision: Chapter 3.1 of the Addendum to DBE Description of Work (second phase workplan)
- The DBE Project websites are: www.digital-ecosystem.org (website) ; www.digital-ecosystem.net (collabnet)
- CORDIS Fact Sheet - e-mail for information : info
dbe.digital-ecosystem.org
Abstract
The project DBE is one of the four Integrated Project selected for funding as result of the call for project proposal FP6-2002-IST-1 under the FP6-IST workprogramme in the area of e-Business. DBE project has started November 2003, the initial duration is 3 years and will be co-funded for this initial period with 10'500'000 € from European Commission.
This is the first FP6 project which addresses "IST as driver for small business and government reorganisation through local development processes including small business ecosystems" and "multidisciplinary researches into complex adaptive and self-organising systems" within the strategic objective : 3.1.9 Networked Business and Governments" .
The two overarching objectives of the DBE project are to provide Europe with a recognised advantage in innovative software application development by its small and medium-sized enterprises (software producer SMEs) and to achieve greater information and communication technology (ICT) adoption by SMEs in general.
The DBE will achieve these objectives by adopting a multi-disciplinary approach based on biology, physics, business and social sciences mechanisms and models to develop an open-source distributed environment that can support the spontaneous evolution and composition of software services (with multiple licensing, revenue and business models, i.e. not necessarily open-source), components, and applications. DBE transposes mechanisms from living organisms like evolution, adaptation, autonomy, viability, introspection, knowledge sharing, and self-organisation, to arrive at novel architectures and technologies, business processes, and knowledge, thus creating a network of digital business ecosystems for SMEs and software providers to improve their value networks and foster local economic development.
Four areas of research encompassed by the DBE project are:
- ICT transfer and adoption, training, ethnography, etc.;
- business modelling;
- computer Science, Software Engineering and enabling technologies (web services, software agents, distributed architectures, ontologies, etc); and
- fundamental models (Maths, Physics, Biology, AI).
One of the outputs of the project is an opensource, component-based software infrastructure that will act as a commons to support the evolutionary optimisation of software services for SMEs. This digital infrastructure will fit the local cultural identities and socio-economic needs of SMEs to support their participation in regional and sectorial innovation clusters. The DBE will change the way SMEs and EU software providers use and distribute their products and services. It will allow SMEs to link enterprise-wide external resources and value networks, and to allocate them based on their business goals and priorities.
The DBE is based on the key finding that with such an evolutionary and self-organising system Europe could harness the complexity of software production and its SME software industry could regain competitiveness in the market, developing and customising software components produced by Smes at local level and fitting with the local identity. The availability of software solutions and services adapted to local needs (i.e. SMEs needs), should improve the ICT adoption from SMEs and improving their way of doing business and productivity.
Labels: DBE abstract
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