UDIECOS: Metodi e Tecniche per Ecosistemi Digitali Urbani - Methods and Techniques for Urban Digital Ecosystems

A natural life ecosystem is defined as a biological community of interacting organisms plus their physical environment. The digital ecosystem approach transposes the concepts to the digital world, reproducing the desiderable mechanisms of natural ecosystems. In other terms, we can think to a digital ecosystem as a self-organising digital infrastructure aimed at creating a digital environment for networked organisations that supports the cooperation, the knowledge sharing, the development of open, secure, and adaptive technologies and evolutionary business models. Aim of this project is to study and develop methods and techniques for urban digital ecosystems (UDIECOS), that is for digital ecosystems specifically focusing on cooperation requirements of digital entities located in an urban territory. We will consider UDIECOS as virtual networked environments composed of multiple and independent entities such as individuals, organizations, services, software and applications sharing one or several missions and focusing on the interactions and inter-relationships among them. UDIECOS should exhibit self-organizing capabilities, due to the re-combination and evolution of its "digital components", in which resources provided by each entity are properly conserved, managed and used. UDIECOSs are highly complex to study and design, due to the multi-disciplinary nature of involved disciplines and technologies. In this project, several research groups are involved that can investigate the various issues in a multi-disciplinary way, covering self-organizing networks, security and privacy, data management and knowledge sharing services. In particular, the following objectives will be pursued. The human mobility in the today’s urban scenarios leads to design a novel network infrastructure capable to flexibly reflect social relationships into node-to-node interactions, and to allow the establishment of node associations mainly driven by contents and affinity of interest. This research will define the protocols and the architectures of the improvised, self-organized, quickly deployable connectivity platform that ensures ubiquitous radio connectivity of mobile end-points. The largely distributed nature of a digital ecosystem makes it a very attractive target of cyberattacks, which can undermine its functionalities. Ad-hoc strategies have to be devised for providing a scalable and secure communication infrastructure that can guarantee reliable information exchanges among the distributed sensors, as well as for detecting in real-time intrusion attempts. To cope with the needs of the virtual networked environment of UDIECOS, this research will define semantic coordination techniques for distributed knowledge sharing, to dynamically discover digital components that can provide semantically related information resources and to enable the on-the-fly creation and management of data mappings between them, for effective resource search and retrieval services.