Digital Ecosystems 3.7.1 Social Network Simulation and Self-Organisation Thomas Kurz^, Antonella Passani*, Thomas J. Heistracher^ ^FH Salzburg Fachhochschulgesellschaft http://www.fh-sbg.ac.at/ thomas.kurz@fh-salzburg.ac.at, thomas.heistracher@fh-sbg.ac.at *CENSIS http://www.censis.it antonellapassani@gmail.com 1. Introduction: Approach for Cooperation Developing the concept of Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) and implementing it at local level through regional engagement implies integrating many areas of interest, including Business, Computing, Science and Socio-Economics (see Heistracher, Kurz, Marcon and Masuch, 2006). Consequently, this presents an important challenge in terms of communication and collaboration, in which different research agenda, different vocabularies and languages need to be compared, to converge or be translated. The concept of Digital Business Ecosystem becomes in fact part of different conceptual frameworks, which need to be constantly interlinked and efficiently connected. The present article describes a path of interdisciplinary collaboration that took place in the second year of the European project DBE and in which computer science played a pivotal role. Specifically, in the following, we present an effective means of collaboration by introducing a simulation framework called Evolutionary Environment Simulator (EVESIM) (Kurz et al, 2006). The two main inputs for the collaboration above the EVESIM are the evolutionary algorithms developed in the science domain and the territorial social network that arose from the social science field research. In principle, the development of evolutionary algorithms and the analysis of social networks could be performed independently, thereby, however, excluding any potential for mutual benefits. In this respect, the EVESIM can be considered a kind of ‘middleware’ between the Natural Science and Social Science domains 1 . The EVESIM is the software simulation framework, which facilitates the communication between the Natural and Social Science “applications” that are possibly based on similar meta-concepts. That does not mean that EVESIM solves all issues of communication, but it is a starting point on how different areas of science can effectively collaborate and take advantage of each other. We discuss in the following the issues in the context of Social Science and Natural Science and, preliminarily, we describe in details the Evolutionary Environment Simulator itself. 1.1. Role of the Evolutionary Environment and EVESIM The name Evolutionary Environment Simulator comes from the initial intention to set up a simulator of the so-called Evolutionary Environment in the DBE project (Heistracher et al, 2004). The Evolutionary Environment is a network of DBE nodes and services which enable the self-organisation of the DBE network and provide a test bed for various research topics like natural language business modelling (OMG, 2006), evolutionary algorithms (Colin, 2002) and distributed intelligence (Briscoe and De Wilde, 2006). For more information on the Evolutionary Environment see also (Masuch, 2006). 1 According to Linthicum (2003) middleware is a software that facilitates the communication between two applications.