Tracks and Special Sessions 
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TRACK ICTs and digital media are forming a new basis for work, commerce, education and social life. Already education and media consumption, business practice, social networks and civic participation are radically changed from a generation ago. Participation of all in the information society, (private and public, metropolitan and regional) is enabled through suitable infrastructures supporting a healthy mix of inclusion and diversity, and where competition and collaboration allows sustainable development and evolution in economic and social arenas. Such infrastructures need common platforms and standards to allow knowledge sharing and communication, but also embrace multidisciplinary and systemic layers that concern the social, the economic and political, and the cognitive and linguistic. These in turn imply applications in areas such as electronic participation in society, new models of knowledge and education delivery, born-digital business models (whether niche or global), and innovative socio-technical designs addressing localised and specific problems. Theory applicable to understanding and conceptualising these developments more broadly will be required.
TRACK Mechatronics Chair – Dan Stan - Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania Mechatronics is the synergistic combination of precision mechanical engineering, electronic control and systems thinking in the design of products and manufacturing processes. It relates to the design of systems, devices and products aimed at achieving an optimal balance between basic mechanical structure and its overall control. MECHATRONICS: Analysis, modelling and simulation, optimisation, system design, motion control, parallel robots, cooperative systems, virtual reality, kinematics and dynamics, genetic algorithms, micro and nano devices, intelligent systems, mechatronic engineering, education in mechatronics, and application of mechatronic systems.
TRACK Digital Ecosystems (DES) have emerged as a new conceptualisation of inter- and intra-organisational distributed collaborative systems in which actors interact in multiple and complex forms for mutual and self-benefit. An understanding of the emerging patterns of interaction and organisational structures facilitates both ongoing use as well as future evolution of DES. To this end, techniques of data analysis, data mining and information visualisation can be employed. When applied to data collected from DES, analytical and visualisation techniques have the potential to aid researchers and developers in improving DES design and implementation. When analytical and visualisation tools are directly embedded in a DES they can benefit its users with enhanced awareness information. This track focuses on the use of all applicable analysis, mining and visualisation techniques to digital ecosystems. Authors intending to submit papers to this track are strongly advised to familiarise themselves with the relevant DES concepts, and to ensure that the connection to DES is made clear in their paper. The following paper is suggested as initial reading: Boley, H. and Chang, E., Digital Ecosystems: Principles and Semantics, Inaugural IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (Cairns, Australia, February 21-23, 2007), 398-403. (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=4233739&isnumber=4233617) Topics may include (but are not limited to):
A Grid Ecosystem consists of the collaboration of geographically distributed parties to produce a solution to real problems of common interest. These problems can fall into different categories such as social collaboration, business management collaboration, e-sciences, e-learning etc. An ecosystem is created from the collaboration of software and business partners. While grid computing concentrated on the resources sharing to offer non-trivial quality of services to users, the cloud computing concentrates on the on-demand access of users to virtual servers, software services and storage by using the web. Both infrastructures can be seen as complementary and involve a smart middleware which may consist of web services, utility computing, intelligent agents, collaboration tools, processing tools, ontology, security tools and the like, to enable the sharing of distributed computing, software and data resources for executing distributed applications. End users are an essential part of the grid/cloud ecosystem and have, in addition to solving their scientific issues, various needs including efficiency and usability that must be satisfied. Industries and academia are more than ever interested in an open grid/cloud ecosystem for open collaboration on top of a net environment. To cope with heterogeneity issues, open, interoperable, standard environments should be used. The grid ecosystem track aims to be a forum for scientists, engineers and practitioners in academia and industry to share their ideas, their research and technical experiences and results on grid and cloud computing. The track will emphasise the design, architecture and software experiences for building up a grid and cloud ecosystem for scientific and engineering applications.
Common Enterprise Application Infrastructures require high level management such as IT governance, so do large heterogeneous IT systems. Small components of these systems implicitly contribute towards system complexity. Along with the large number of new software artefacts, new challenges emerge etc. in the areas of enterprise organisation, roles and responsibilities, service lifecycles, standards, finance and the like. In order to be effective, the central challenge is to guarantee compliance to legal, technical and internal regulations. In order to provide homogenisation of these issues, new governance approaches and corresponding applications have to be deployed. This track deals with the application and support of Governance in Large Heterogeneous IT Systems: - SOA Governance
Web based communication is creating unprecedented opportunities for large scale knowledge aggregation, and new challenges for technologists and social scientists who are working to develop organisational systems and infrastructures. The proliferation of easily accessible and intuitive web based social software tools and environments is enabling multitudes of people to connect, communicate and exchange information and knowledge in near real time, thus exploding the potential for 'collective intelligence 'to take place. While a universally accepted model and definition of 'Collective intelligence', has not yet emerged, examples of web based collective intelligence, can be found in different disciplines (from learning to economic development to governance), Although a few authoritative initiatives have been started in this direction, such as The Centre for Collective Intelligence at MIT, (http://cci.mit.edu), books and blogs are being written, CI still remains undefined and elusive, it is exposed to scepticism. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/11/mit_junk_science)This track aims to promote a sound interdisciplinary framework for the field of CI, harnessing from different areas of research, grounded in the respective scientific theories, and capable of encompassing different perspectives: socio-political, technical, scientific. We encourage inter- and multi- disciplinary approaches that cover more than one aspect of CI and encourage original and quality contributions as follows: - Domain definition of collective intelligence (what is CI?)
Ecosystems in nature have always excited interest and been studied for a long time – a natural ecosystem is understood as an interactive system established between living creatures and the environment in which they live (Arthur Tansley, 1871-1955). Members of an ecosystem benefit from each others’ participation, even if the benefits are not so obvious in the first instance. Studies of biodiversity indicate that the respective populations in a predator-pray relationship tend towards a stable attractor. In the era of the Knowledge Economy interest in the value network, rather than the value chain, has increased and opened up the space for considering concepts observed in living organisms that appear in studies of biodiversity. In this thinking, enterprises and business relationships are modelled as living, autopoietic networks. In talking about Digital Ecosystems we make an analogy to an environment defined by a socio-economic context whose members are software artefacts, be they components, applications, information sources or businesses. In the light of the ever increasing complexity of modern software which is often expected to perform previously unrelated functions, and the need for software applications that are highly concurrent and distributed, it seems useful to pursue this analogy further. A digital ecosystem is a self-organising digital infrastructure aimed at creating an environment for networked organisations that supports cooperation, knowledge sharing, the development of open and adaptive technologies, and evolutionary business models. Some of the characteristics found in natural ecosystems, such as the absence of a central point of command and control, the increased diversity, and the dynamic interrelationship between participants and the environment, are relevant to the software world and the inherent properties exhibited by an ecosystem are desirable in various settings. In a business setting, sustainable economic growth (or survival) is a common denominator for small, medium and large organisations. In order to achieve sustainable digital business ecosystems, an appropriate software infrastructure for e-business transactions is required, together with new formal and semi-formal languages that enable open and trusted collaborations between small, medium, and large enterprises to ensure their sustainability in an (ultimately global) Digital Ecosystem. This entails a move away from traditional centralised solutions for transaction modelling, and towards fully distributed solutions. With this comes a demand for a purely distributed network whose topology continuously evolves to reflect its usage by the participating entities. This track within this year's IEEE-DEST conference is concerned with the development of transaction models to facilitate B2B collaboration in digital ecosystems and the design of the most effective underlying network topologies required to support both business and knowledge service composition. The aim is to understand the ways in which networks of collaborations generate value in different, mutually beneficial, ways, including both tangible and intangible assets.
Our society of the 21st century makes great demands on its members in virtually every part of their lives. It is expected that members of the society keep pace with mutable situations, adapt their skills and expertise, and collaborate and compete to provide to some extent value for the society. As a result, modern instructional design, learning goals and processes as well as appropriate learning environments must support the development of the aforementioned skills and expertises. Consequently, educational approaches have changed dramatically over time from remedial repetitive learning to today’s learning with an understanding to become more independent in the learning process, strengthen metacognitive and teamwork skills as well as link knowledge in cultural context to be prepared for lifelong learning. Educational approaches have also been influenced by technology but have also increasingly applied technology over the last decades. This complexity of modern learning setups of the 21st century demand appropriate models and reference architectures which support (a) to communicate the conception of topical learning from different viewpoints, (b) to identify the multidisciplinary relations of research areas, (c) to assess and classify learning approaches and implementations, (d) to provide domain knowledge for research and development activities. But such modern learning settings also require flexible approaches and technological solutions. E-Learning Ecosystems can provide both: it provides the foundation for interesting models and frameworks but it also focuses on modern technology as the infrastructure for enhanced e-learning environments. Based on the ecosystem conception and the digital business ecosystem idea, this track welcomes original and quality contributions in areas including:
Conceptually the function of a Digital Ecosystem can seem in conflict with the principles of data security and information privacy. While a DE aims to facilitate the cooperation, knowledge sharing, and open networking between collaborating organisations, it often overshadows an organisations inherent commercial competitive advantage of protecting their data, such as valuable intellectual property. With the expanding array of collaborative digital communication mediums, ensuring robust security and privacy controls are in place and functioning correctly is increasingly difficult. Protection is required for an organisation’s explicit knowledge and also with frequent informal collaborative communications a digital ecosystem member entity must protect their tacit knowledge. This track will focus on data security and information privacy specifications, expectations, realisations and technologies for digital ecosystems. Ideally, solutions should provide protection for an organisation’s explicit and tacit knowledge without severely hindering its availability and worth to the digital ecosystem. Major topics of interest include but are not limited to: - Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) for digital ecosystems
Service-oriented collaboration platforms enable and scale the involvement of a large number of participants who can be geographically distributed and remotely collaborate in forming goal-directed social networks. This is an emerging field and assembles both the physical and virtual services existing in a society by means of multiple technologies such as semantic web technologies, Web 2.0, social networks and so on. Service-oriented collaboration platforms have momentous social and economic impacts on human society. Our goal is to bring together ideas and technologies from many different fields within ICT in an evolutionary manner to address research challenges. The objective of this track is to seek original papers in the field of service-oriented collaboration platforms from theoretical and foundational results to empirical evaluations as well as practical and industrial experiences, with the emphasis on results that contribute to solving the many, still open, research problems that are of importance to the field of service-oriented applications. Topics include but are not limited to the following: - Social networks for service-oriented collaboration platforms TRACK The idea of examining health in digital ecosystems has been developed as an intellectual and practical response to the needs of our time. An ecosystem is where an environment exists, all elements constantly interact, and trans-disciplinary vision is used to study the inter-plays. Health is one of most multi-dimensional, most trans-disciplinary and most dynamic issues of our time. It, therefore, requires a new approach. ‘Digital Health Ecosystems’ are developed in order to provide a framework for maintaining and enhancing health. Health in this regard is used to cover the ‘health’ of all human beings, of all living organisms, of communities, schools, factories and work places, and the health of environment and of the glob. Such a comprehensive view of health requires ‘Digital Ecosystems’ in which all conditions, factors, elements and dimensions can be measured, followed and be used to develop multi-dimensional indicators of the status of health. DES can be designed to link hospitals, medical centres, physicians, medical practitioners, medial research centres, medical researchers, heath institutes, and universities. - Maintaining electronic health status records
As a fundamentally new way of developing software, Open Source Software (OSS) has received enormous attention over the past decade with worldwide impact towards a ‘faster, better, cheaper’ software industry. Whether open source software is absolutely superior to proprietary software is still an object of controversy but there is little doubt that OSS has changed the way organisations, businesses, developers and users build, release, deploy and use software and software-intensive services. What really distinguishes open source from traditional software does not lie in its openness for source code but an ‘Architecture of Participation’ (AOP) that includes low barriers to entry by newcomers, and some mechanisms for isolating the ‘cathedral from the bazaar’. Interestingly, with the recent boom of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the AOP has reached the point where one can no longer easily distinguish between open-source and SaaS in terms of software development, revenue sharing and business models. More recently, we have witnessed a number of successful OSS projects which are directly supported by profit-driven firms and many open source developers are not volunteers as in traditional open source projects. OSS is a multi-faceted phenomenon that requires an interdisciplinary approach simultaneously addressing multiple issues including software technology, software engineering, service science, economics, management, legal, and socio-cultural dynamics. This approach fits well with the notion of digital ecosystems. The aim of this track is to bring together academic researchers, industry practitioners and open source community participants for reporting research findings, sharing practical experiences, and highlighting research challenges and future directions. Topics may include: - OSS infrastructure and digital ecosystems
Business activities / tasks are inherently complex and may need the participation of multiple business entities in order to achieve them. A group of business entities may work collaboratively in a predefined manner in order to carry out a business activity, which the individual business entities may not be able to deliver on an individual basis. Complex business solutions can easily be provided and achieved through collaboration and the formation of a business ecosystem by composing different entities. This track aims to be a discussion centre for addressing issues related to complex tasks and their solutions in Business Ecosystems. The areas of interest include but not limited to: - Coalition formation in BE
TRACK - Web Spam including splog, spamdexing, review/opinion spam, social-network spam, image and tag spam Results should be shown using one of the following standard spam datasets
Analysis of the role of human perception, engagement and expectation is critical to understanding the complexity of digital ecosystems as well as the operational dynamics of any specific system. Our capacity to build, maintain and further develop viable digital ecosystems rests on clear, theoretical and applied understanding of the way in which humans and computers interact with one another in digital, networked environments. There are several research directions of the work in eHumanities. The first relates to the increasing development of digital ecosystems in the various branches of humanities. In this viewpoint, we study standards-based, interoperable distributed service and resource environments e. g. service and resource networks or grids that allow seamless integration on both tool and the resource side. Connected to this is the second direction in which ‘intelligent’ interactive expertise networks might be developed to solve the problems of knowledge-based distributed collaboration between experts and those who draw on their expertise. A ‘network of interactive knowledge’ (NIKs) approach can be usefully applied to scholarly collaboration, as well as other situations in which people need to collaborate through exchanges of partial knowledge so that they might construct a collective expertise greater than the sum of its individual parts. The third component of research concerns the broader relationship of technology and society, with particular reference to the cultures and politics of society’s adoption of, and adaptation to, new forms of technologically mediated communication and information sharing and of technology’s requirements to adapt to existing cultural semiotic processes.
On November 20th, 2006, the Finnish EU Presidency has launched a European Network of Living Labs for the ‘co-creation of innovation in public, private and civic partnership’. This is the first step towards a new European Innovation System, entailing a major paradigm shift for the whole innovation process. A European Network of Living Labs is a collaboration of Public Private Partnerships where firms, public authorities and people work together in creating, prototyping, validating and testing new services, businesses, markets and technologies in real-life contexts, such as cities, city regions, rural areas and collaborative virtual networks between public and private players. The real-life and everyday contexts both stimulate and challenge research and development, as do public authorities and citizens not only participate in, but also contribute to the whole innovation process. The Living Lab concept is about moving out of laboratories into real-life contexts. In the past years, a number of national experiences can be mentioned across Western Europe, and more recently, an integration effort has been set out in a trans-European perspective. From a market and industrial perspective, Living Labs offer a research and innovation platform over different social and cultural systems, cross-regionally and cross-nationally. This is a natural move for ICT, life sciences and any innovation domain that deals with human and social problem solving and people’s every day lives. However, this new approach to research for innovation is a huge challenge for research methodologies, innovation process management, public-private partnership models, IPRs, open source practices, development of new leadership, governance and financial instruments. This complexity increases remarkably with the international nature of a European Network of Living Labs, implying a set of large-scale experimentation platforms for new services, business and technology, market and industry creation within ICT environment. The aim of the proposed symposium is to further improve over this promising state of the art, by exploring success and failure stories and report on methodologies and toolsets for the pan-European deployment of Living Labs in the areas of collaborative research, thus creating new opportunities for networking and best practice exchange between public entities, individuals, industry and academia. Through the replication of systems already operational and the integration of similar experiences across EU Member States, originally thought for the animation of democratic discussions and participative public opinion formation at local and regional level, we aim to revolutionise the networking and repeated interaction of Living Labs participants during the development and implementation of innovative collaborative research projects. In the symposium we invite key professionals and researchers who shall contribute to the addressed subjects and have the opportunity to examine complementarities and explore the opportunities for useful synergies.
Contemporary business organisations increasingly rely on dynamic processes to satisfy their customers’ demands. Data which feed into these processes are derived from multiple sources and domains. Often, these data are heterogeneous nature. Mapping and modelling of these heterogeneous data are required to provide quality services, especially during integrated project management. Modernisation and innovation of data integration methodologies are essential to ensure data structures are logically and intelligently stored in a warehouse environment. Implementation of data integration methodologies is a critical issue for delivering quality products and or services. Knowledge acquired during data integration, and its interpretation through project execution, has immense scope and opportunity in enhancing the return on project implementations. Data structuring and integration methodologies are welcome in this technical forum and the case studies provide us opportunities to consider future implementation improvements in industry situations. For example, petroleum, environment, health-care, are typical industries, though each is an individual domain entity, they are logically interconnected via data modelling and mapping methodologies - a quality petroleum product is delivered in a healthy and clean environment. Technology (data integration methodologies), processes (interconnection between project entities), and people (knowledge builders, with data mining and project executors) involved in project design, integration and management, significantly renovate outcomes and help ensure superior quality product or service provision to customers. Papers on the topics of Data Structuring or Integration, Knowledge Mapping or Modelling, and Implementation Case Studies are invited in this session. Methodological contributions are especially welcomed, either as Case Studies, or as theoretical contributions.  SPECIAL SESSION Collaborative Systems and Sustainability for Digital Business Ecosystems Chair – Achim Karduck - Furtwangen University, Germany The concept of Digital Business Ecosystems (DBE) is fundamentally based on collaboration, consisting of cooperation and competition in a peaceful environment. The notion of a peaceful environment refers to the complement of market-based collaboration and guiding regulatory principles (e.g. compliance, sustainability governance). In such DBEs, enabled by the latest technical advances underlying collaborative systems (e.g. sensor / RFID technologies, mobility / collaboration support, collective intelligence), radically novel scenarios in terms of sustainability support in many application areas can be expected. In the context Cyber Engineering, this special session aims to investigate the contributions of the resulting DBEs for supporting sustainable developments. As an example, the creation of a product / service along its international value chain could be captured in an RFID-chip, also including references to the enterprise-portals of the (component) suppliers. The envisioned transparency along the value chain could further be enriched by collaboration support, and information provided by means of collective intelligence (cci.mit.edu), thus connecting all participants. In such a scenario, sustainability would not be limited to important issues like carbon footprint, materials or production circumstances. Enterprises / organisations might assure as well their (intellectual) copyrights and thus benefit in terms of their innovation capacity. - Collaborative systems dimensions - Sustainability support dimensions - Collaborative systems adoption - Smart items and sensor technologies - Collective intelligence - Business process support - Resource allocation and risk management - Copyright enforcement and innovation -- Back to top --
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