OPAALS

Open Philosophies for Associative Autopoietic

DigitaL EcoSystemsSotiris Moschoyiannis, Amir r Razavi, Paul

Krause

Architecture and Process 2008

Introduction• What is a Digital Ecosystem

• A digital ecosystem is a self-organising digital infrastructure aimed at creating a digital environment for networked organizations that supports cooperation, knowledge sharing, the development of open and adaptive technologies and evolutionary business models.

• DE Business Environment

• Distributed Long-lived Transactions for SMEs

• Challenges

• Business transactions performance, failures and consistency

• Network response to dynamicity of environment, connectivity and fragmentations

The Web is an EcosystemThe Web is an Ecosystem

What is an Ecosystem?

•An interactive system established between living creatures and the environment in which they live–Arthur Tansley (1871-1955)

•(Arguably) The members of an ecosystem “benefit” from each others’ participation–Typically the respective populations in a predator-

prey relationship tend towards a stable (sometimes cyclic) attractor

The environment is:• a social context• a digital infrastructure

In a “Digital Ecosystem”

The members are:• e-Businesses, software

services, information sources

A Digital Ecosystem?

•The nature of the environment defines the properties of the ecosystem–we would claim

A complex, adaptive system?

•A digital ecosystem is a self-organising digital infrastructure aimed at creating a digital environment for networked organizations that supports cooperation, knowledge sharing, the development of open and adaptive technologies and evolutionary business models.

What are we trying to build?

• An environment which encourages diversity

• Absence of critical points of failure or control

• Preservation of “local autonomy” of participants

• only reveal what you choose to reveal

• Robust support for long-term transactions (interactions) between members

THE CONTENT, LINKS, AND TRANSACTIONS

• “I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

• [ref: Berners-Lee, Tim; Fischetti, Mark (1999). Weaving the Web. Harper San Francisco, chapter 12. ISBN 9780062515872- ref: 24]

THE CONTENT, LINKS, AND TRANSACTIONS

• “I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

• [ref: Berners-Lee, Tim; Fischetti, Mark (1999). Weaving the Web. Harper San Francisco, chapter 12. ISBN 9780062515872- ref: 24]

THE CONTENT, LINKS, AND TRANSACTIONS

• “I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

• [ref: Berners-Lee, Tim; Fischetti, Mark (1999). Weaving the Web. Harper San Francisco, chapter 12. ISBN 9780062515872- ref: 24]

• “I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

• [ref: Berners-Lee, Tim; Fischetti, Mark (1999). Weaving the Web. Harper San Francisco, chapter 12. ISBN 9780062515872- ref: 24]

THE CONTENT, LINKS, AND TRANSACTIONS

Hedges, et al. Continental breakup and the ordinal diversification

of birds and mammals, Nature 381, 226-229 (1996)

The solution•Software agents on behalf of people (SMEs)

• Gather and store local knowledge (local contexts);

• Collect and accumulate knowledge from outside (external links);

• Manage content;

• Promoting the stored contexts for outside and provide external links;

• Process business activities and transactions.

•Digital Business Ecosystem

• Keeping the transaction-created networks

• Creating a connected network between services (service providers – SMEs).

The complexity of Digital Business Ecosystem

• is not a connected network

•has a very dynamic nature

•content, links, transactions

•does not have potential for creating all sort of links between different content or service providers

• is relying on centralised controls for business activities

• is not fully resistant against failures and errors

• is not stable, with traffic bottlenecks and other uncontrolled parameters easily affecting the environment

Transactions in DEs•Correspond to business activities and involve complex interactions between service providers/consumers

•B2B scenarios require long-running transactions (min, hrs, days…) which involve the execution of a number of underlying services

•Comprise a mixture of different levels of composition (subtransactions) of several services from different service providers

•Local autonomy and loosely-coupled services – SMEs… but also SOA as the enabling technology of a DE for business

•ACID properties are questionable; Atomicity? Isolation? Consistency

•Release of results before transaction commit (partial results)

•Recovery management (recoverability)

•Compensation

•Omitted results

•Forward recovery

Managing dependencies

•Capture dependencies within and across transactions

•Within a transaction we use Internal Dependency Graphs (IDG)

•Across transactions we use External Dependency Graphs (EDG)

•Each platform only knows about before and after

•A fully distributed mechanism for local coordination and log-based recovery management in long-running transactions

Business network properties

•Connectivity

•Supporting Business activities (distributed business transactions)

•Resistant to fragmentations

•Transaction recoverability (costly)

•Forward recovery

•Alternative scenarios/paths (using diversity of DEs)

•Dynamicity

•Local Autonomy (loosely coupling)

•Time-based business activity (regional behaviour/availability)

•Versatile SMEs business model (changing the business nature time to time

21

Distributed coordination for executing transaction

22

Virtual Private Transaction Networks

23OPAALS23

A measurement for Platform stability

Virtualization levels

25

Connecting VPTNs

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Super peers and permanent nodes

super peers are expensive nodes with costly maintenance requirements

Who is going to provide such

nodes?

during peak time the pressure of high traffic can result in a bottleneck on super peer nodes

How they cope with the dynamic network

structure?

processing redundant data and producing overheads waste at off-peak times of the network

while they will be continuously under pressure at peak time while the network grows

How regular cost increased can be

justified?

PERMANENT CLUSTERS & VIRTUAL SUPER PEERS

Good connectivity

Spreading Traffic

Clustering stability and local storage

Network Dynamicity on VSPs

Dynamic algorithm for choosing nodes for VSPs

Achilles heel of the networkhigh dependency on a few number of nodes

vulnerable on any smart attack on hubs

As the fragmentation on the network (creating islands in the network)

costly to repair (de-fragmentation)

inconsistency of such a model with the dynamicity of a digital ecosystem

SMEs may not provide stable and permanent nodes for hubs at all

This means fragmentation even without any external attack or physical failures

Digital Business Ecosystem network resistance against failures

31

Further work

•“Web 3.0, a phrase coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called 'the intelligent Web' — .... — which emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience.”