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 |
