2008 Second IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE DEST 2008)
© 2008 IEEE.
DIGITAL ECOSYSTEMS, COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE,
ONTOLOGY AND THE 2ND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS
Paola Di Maio, Member IEEE
MFU.AC.TH Chiang Rai Thailand, paola,dimaio AT gmail.com
Abstract— Digital Ecosystems are interconnected environ-
ments which enable the proliferation and harnessing of Collect-
ive Intelligence. Ontologies built in support of information sys-
tems that constitute the fabric of digital environments need to
take into account dynamic factors which contribute to ‘ongoing
change' in the underlying reality. In this paper we put forward
the hypothesis that 'entropy' (as defined in the second law of
thermodynamics) as well as similar metrics must be used as a
measurement to evaluate dynamic factors, and lay down the
foundation for further research.
Index Terms: Digital Ecosystems, Ontology, Entropy, Business
Intelligence.
I. INTRODUCTION
Information Systems are becoming pervasive and adaptive, cap-
able of supporting and storing as much data as it is generated by
the day by individuals and organisations and to respond to changes
in the digital environments in which they reside. For information
however to be usable to deliver knowledge and intelligence, there
are still many challenges, such as defining optimal knowledge rep-
resentation for complex and dynamic models of reality, configur-
ing automated discrete reasoning capabilities. Ontologies are im-
portant artefacts necessary to support the design and maintenance
of evolving 'digital ecosystems'. During the course of related work,
we identify the importance of change and transformation as key
factors that should be reflected in knowledge representation and
models of reality. In this paper we propose that future develop-
ments in ontology engineering methodologies include mechanisms
to model 'change' and 'transformation. Our future research aims to
evaluate the relevance of ‘entropy’ based methods as a possible
way forward in this direction.'
II. DIGITAL ECOSYSTEMS
The word ecosystems, coined by A. G. Tansley (1935) is de-
rived from the words ecology , from the Greek oikos "habitat", and
system, a 'unit' or whole made up of different components which
generally interact to establish and maintain some level of 'equilib-
rium' . 'Digital ecosystems' refer to extended, interconnected envir-
onments where information is exchanged digitally by its compon-
ents: the internet is a large, dynamic and open digital ecosystem
where individual users and their software 'agents' are the smallest
components, that contribute to the creation and consumption of di-
gital information. If natural ecosystems are complex and their in-
ternal dynamics largely still unexplained in terms of individual be-
haviours, Digital Ecosystems (DE) are even more complex and
challenging to observe and understand, as they emerge from the in-
tersection of the social and information technology (cybernetics)
dimensions, already highly complex when analysed separately, and
exponentially so when combined. One of the emerging discipline
that studies the social aspect of digital ecosystems is 'social net-
works analysis' (SNA), Two interesting phenomena observed in
natural as well as artificial ecosystems, are co-evolution and self-
organisation. Co-evolution of diverse elements interacting within
a social ecosystem is defined as a series of reciprocal steps during
which two or more ecologically interacting species respond to one
another evolutionarily. There are different models of co-evolution
in social sciences also referred to as 'interliving', co-adaptation,
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and to some extent, co-opetition. Self organization, together with
the related concepts autopoiesis and autocatalysis [1] is the ability
of individual components of an ecosystem to develop internal and
external dynamics that provide self synchronization within the sys-
tem – Research investigating how the DNA is a carrier of social in-
telligence has been done in bacterial colonies [2] , demonstrating,
albeit under a microscope, how social intelligence exists thanks to
communication and information exchange at cellular level. Later
in this paper we discuss the relevance of thermondynamics prin-
ciple to self-organization.
III. COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
Collective Intelligence, the sum of available reasoning capability
(humans plus machines), coupled with the sum of existing explicit
knowledge that can be represented and accessed by such reasoning
engines, is still only a vision that may arise from the availability of
powerful communication technologies.. Several initiatives have
been started at academic, social and entrepreneurial level to study
and capture the potential of collective intelligence. While know-
ledge bases are being developed online in real time (wikipedia, db-
pedia), software applications and environments that support col-
lective reasoning are still largely at research stage.
Innovative research [3] proposes a method to measure the col-
lective intelligence quotient (CQ) and anticipate the future emer-
gence of 'collective intelligence engineering as a fully fledged aca-
demic discipline. Collective Intelligence and Reasoning, once sup-
ported by suitable intelligent environments, will enable 'collective
decision making', another important evolution of digital ecosys-
tems which is expected to produce operational efficiencies such as
[4]
• Catalyze networked effects
• Create high transaction rates
• Enable rapid adaptation to dynamic conditions
• Execute distributed or concentrated operations
• Self-organize decision making – defined by simple rule sets
• Generate “organic intelligence” and leverage Global intelli-
gence
IV. ONTOLOGY
In the age of exponential data proliferation, ontologies have be-
come central to design, implement and maintain adequate informa-
tion systems, they are also critical to enable 'business intelligence'.
Ontologies are conceptual and semantic frameworks representing
models of the world, as well as explicit and complete knowledge
representation of a model of reality, expressed using different
formalisms and artefacts. Deborah L. McGuinness n an early art-
icle “Ontologies Come of Age” [5], analyzed such benefit in more
detail, summarized briefly below:
* Consistency checking — if ontologies contain information
about properties and value restrictions on the properties, then type
checking can be done within applications.
* Completion — an application may obtain a small amount of
information from a user, such as the fact that he or she is looking
for a high-resolution screen on a PC, and then have the ontology
expand the exact pixel range that is to be expected.
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© 2008 IEEE.
* Interoperability support — in the simple case of consider-
ing controlled vocabularies, there is enhanced interoperability sup-
port since different users/applications are using the same set of
terms.
* Support validation and verification testing of data (and
schemas) — if an ontology contains class descriptions, such as
“StanfordEmployee,” these definitions may be used as queries to
databases to discover what kind of coverage currently exists in
datasets.
* Encode entire test suites — an ontology may contain a num-
ber of definitions of terms, some instance definitions, and then in-
clude a term definition that is considered to be a query: find all
terms that meet the following conditions, for example.
* Configuration support — class terms may be defined so that
they contain descriptions of what kinds of parts may be in a sys-
tem.
* Support structured, comparative, and customized search
— for example, if one is looking for televisions, a class description
for television may be obtained from an ontology, its properties
may be obtained (such as diagonal, price, manufacturer, etc.), and
then a comparative presentation may be made of televisions by
presenting the values of each of the properties.
* Exploit generalization/specialization information — if a
search application finds that a user’s query generates too many an-
swers, one may dissect the query to see if any terms in it appear in
an ontology, and, if so, then the search application may suggest
specializing that term. Digital ecosystems, tend to be chaotic in
nature. Among the overall benefits supplied by the development
and adoption of appropriate ontologies when designing open
world information environments, literature identifies:
* Improve the efficiency of reasoning
* Consolidate and harmonize existing data/information
* Provide an abstract, more simplified view of a system
* Create a consensual, unified view that can be used as a me-
diation tool between different opinions
* Provide a formal specification
* Support integration of data, applications, and systems to
help minimize design and planning errors caused by lack of do-
main knowledge
Generally, it can be said that ontologies provide a consistent
view of reality, or of a model of reality, therefore they support bet-
ter informed decisions and choices and allow collaborative intelli-
gence to be built around them.
V. CAPTURING PATTERNS OF TRANSFORMATION:
THERMODYNAMICS APPROACH
Anything that exists, that we know of, is constantly in flux,
transforming, moving, expanding, contracting, yielding and
morphing into the next thing When it comes to ‘digital ecosys-
tems’ such ongoing evolution is very evident and potentially dis-
rupting to any business process which aims to rely on such envir-
onments. One of the main challenges of Business Intelligence is to
detect, and where possible to predict, patterns of change, to better
align internal organisational resources and processes that must
constantly be readjusted due to some change occurring in another
part of the system, that inevitably reflects on all its components.
The ability of an organisation to transform, be flexible and adapt,
has always been viewed as a competitive advantage. Business
transformation is an executive management technique to align the
technology initiatives of a company more closely with its business
strategy and vision. The degree to which a company can imple-
ment new initiatives to support changes in business strategy is
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known as business agility. Business transformation is achieved
through efforts from the business and IT sides of the company.
Thanks to transformation, operations can adapt to rapid strategic
changes. When conditions change, goals and plans need to be ad-
apted, and the set of organizational assets — data, processes,
people — as well as everything that follows “change” need to be
modelled accordingly. Transformation can happen at three levels:
1. Business model transformation is a key strategic practice of
enabling and supporting — with suitable methods and techniques
— adaptation in an organizational environment through changes.
2. Data transformation is the process of redefining data based
on some predefined rules that generally embed some kind of enter-
prise and business logic. The data values are redefined based on a
specific formula or technique.
3. Process transformation is concerned with supporting the ad-
aptation, evolution, and optimizations of organizational processes,
which are actually “ongoing” — think, for example, of “process
improvement.”
Researchers who have studied business process modelling in
detail have identified, however, that most of the problems with
transformation, even the most practical ones, are of a conceptual
nature and so they could hardly be solved with technical innova-
tions, rather they need to be addressed at model and representation
level (6). According to the law of conservation of mass, (aka first
law of thermodynamics), 'nothing is lost, and nothing is created,
everything is transformed'. (When applied to ‘data’, it has been
noted, this is however not entirely true, as data is created and can
be lost) To be able to leverage the principles of transformation, and
learn how to apply them in the context of social and information
systems, the social sciences look at physics, aiming to capture
insights into the natural laws that may drive change. Information
plays a key role in the ability of an organism to adapt, respond and
survive to environmental 'changes'. Another important assertion of
the key nature of transformation is found in the second law of ther-
modynamics, which is essentially a general principle about the dy-
namic of 'energy dispersion' (http://www.secondlaw.com) also
known as the Law of Increased Entropy, which is a measure of un-
usable energy. As usable energy decreases and unusable energy in-
creases, "entropy" increases. Entropy is also defined as a measure
of randomness or chaos, as usable energy is irretrievably lost, dis-
organization, randomness and chaos increase. Entropy has been
expressed and studied in different forms by different scientists,
namely Canot, Clausius, Boltzmann, Gibbs . Each approach pro-
poses a different interpretation relevant to its context: some define
entropy in terms of 'energy exchange', others in terms of 'ability to
do work', others in terms of 'measure of organization of a system'',
and so on, until more recent interpretations - entropy as semantic
distance between two words, or as imprecision in the translation of
a term in two different languages. In the context of signal pro-
cessing and communication theory Shannon [7] famously related
entropy to information and defined it as a "measure of the uncer-
tainty associated with a random variable". Although some argued
that the concept of 'entropy' applied to physical science as stated in
the second law is not directly comparable to the notion of entropy
in the communication theory context, the idea of information as
'available energy' is becoming increasingly acceptable in the in-
formation age. David Wolpert, researcher with NASA has estab-
lished a new line of research called 'Probability Collectives', which
determines that statistical physics and game theory 'are identical'
[8].The Probability Collectives framework was initially designed
to reduce flutter of an airplane wing , but its principles can be ap-
plied in the social sciences by replacing the word "agent" with the
word "player" throughout the maths, says the researcher. Wolpert
believes that the principles underlying information theory could be
the binding glue among many disciplines "…Information theory
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© 2008 IEEE.
has been extensively applied to many other disciplines, for ex-
ample, in the guise of the maximum entropy principle, it has found
great applicability in data processing and analysis. More generally,
it is now recognized that there are a host of statistical inference
techniques related to information theory which have proven very
powerful in many different fields” Wolpert says that in the future,
information theory's greatest new contributions will be to *relate*
disciplines and contribute to scientific convergence. Entropy is
also used in mechanical statistics, quantum mechanics, economics,
and even in music. However it was not until Prigogine's times, (he
received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1977) who studied en-
tropy applied to chemistry to biology, and contributed to the emer-
gence of chaos theory and complexity theory , that entropy has
been said to apply also to open systems, and not just to closed sys-
tems as previously believed.
VI. SELF ORGANISATION
The 'Law of maximum entropy production'(MEP), also known
as the 'law of spontaneous order' takes the second law a bit further.
It says that 'entropy production is maximized at the fastest rate giv-
en the constraints' meaning that systems are inherently capable of
selecting the most efficient route (which happens to coincide with
the most organized system state) to compensate for disequilibrium
and reach stability (minimum entropy state).[9]
Maximum entropy is seen therefore as the main force behind the
'self –organisation' principle, which is the ability of a system to
find 'spontaneously' internal equilibrium and maximum stability
[10]. Entropy based prediction and probability methods are ap-
plied successfully in knowledge and data mining, where large data
sets and the number of unknown variable and missing data is sig-
nificant. Tzannes and Noonan, of Tufts University, say that "The
success of entropy methods is typically measured from an empiric-
al point of view, that is, they are applied to specific problems and
shown to be successful and often superior to classical methods.
This, of course, still leaves reasonable doubt in theoreticians
minds as to the true merit of entropy methods and a fairly large
body of research has been dedicated to justifying their use from a
theoretical point of view . Typically: a relation between classical
estimation theoretic methods and the entropy methods is shown
that is meant to further validate the use of the entropy method.
[12]
Entropy methods are sometimes used in combination with other
methods, such as bayesian inference, helping the pre-processing
and data 'cleaning' required to support advanced business intelli-
gence algorithms “In data mining and data warehousing, data pre-
paration is often sized accurately at 60 to 90 percent of the effort -
and that is with structured data” says Lou Agosta, IBM business
intelligence analyst, [12] "As business intelligence (BI) evolves
from recounting the past to forecasting the future, unstructured in-
formation and enterprise search capabilities move to centre stage.
...The emerging role of business intelligence systems is to alert de-
cision-makers proactively about critical situations. This requires a
number of search capabilities that are not usually associated with
inferences and predictions based on the data in standard relational
databases, much less standard query and reporting tools that form
the bulk of business intelligence applications. ..
Progress continues to be driven by advances in statistical and rule-
based natural language processing (NLP), ontology (data model-
ling plus reasoning), information retrieval, machine learning, auto-
mated reasoning and knowledge sources (including lexicons and
frameworks for handling meaning).... . " GME is already adopted
by business intelligence solutions such as SAS [13]. Jim Nell,
who worked on ISO standards for NIST Manufacturing Systems
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supported the principles advocated by Tom Stonier in the book "
Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe" He said
that information and organization are intimately related, that all or-
ganized structures contain information, and no organized structure
can exist without information content. The addition of information
to a system manifests itself by causing a system to become more
organized, or reorganized. If organization and disorganization are
related to order and disorder, information has an inverse relation-
ship with entropy.” [14]. Richard Janow, a physicist, studies Shan-
non's entropy applied to the productivity of organizations , in par-
ticular with reference to their 'decision making abilities'. He intro-
duces the concept of 'organizational entropy' and applies it to help
determine the degree of 'decision complexity', in the context of or-
ganisational growth, and to explain the increased time needed by
an organization to be capable of making decisions, in a non linear
proportion to its size. He writes: "In organizations, there are ana-
logous flows of management- and application-related decisions,
and a modified Shannon model may be applicable. …Just as en-
tropy for a communication channel measures the average informa-
tion content (bits per symbol) of symbols transmitted over it or-
ganizational entropy grows as a decision network grows even if
the complexity of the tasks themselves remains unchanged. … Im-
portantly, the entropy grows fast enough to more than offset
growth in the total of individuals' capacities for making basic bin-
ary decisions. … There appears to be a fundamental upper limit on
the total management decision rate that grows slower than linearly
with the number of nodes, the maximum per capita management
decision rate therefore actually shrinks as the number of decision
makers in the network grows". [15]. The findings above suggest
that when expanding (increasing in size) an organization is likely
to become less efficient in terms of decision making capacity and
speed, given increased the 'dispersion rate' of its management , and
that measures to control 'structural entropy' should be taken.. Or-
ganizational entropy (disorganization, inefficiency, unusable en-
ergy) according to Janow grows with the size of the decision net-
work. 'The connection between entropy, information, and choice' is
long-standing, he says . "When the range of decision network
states is large so is the entropy; the organization is then also
something of a general-purpose tool. Conversely, when entropy is
small, the organization will probably do a prescribed set of spe-
cialized tasks efficiently and others not at all. Large organizational
entropy is the price of having the capabi1ity to execute a range of
complicated, multi-person decision/tasks; that ability impairs effi-
ciency when doing simple tasks'"
VII. SEMANTIC ENTROPY
Entropy based algorithms are commonly adopted by scores of
statistical and probabilistic methods developed in the attempt to
establish and predict any given degree of certainty concerning the
dynamics of information in very large data sets, as well as on one
of the most unpredictable, largely untested, fast growing informa-
tion environment, the semantic web. From the work of Philip Res-
nik [16] who in 1999 was already using statistical information to
address the problems of ambiguity in natural language, to Dan
Melamed who uses semantic entropy can be applied to linguistic
translations, as a measure of semantic 'ambiguity and ‘uninformat-
iveness’, entropy is used as measure of everything that you can't
quite put your fingers on.
VIII. ENTROPY AND ONTOLOGY
Today, knowledge management and decision support systems
in enterprises are becoming increasingly 'ontology based', that is,
they rely on the existence of an accurate view of the world to mod-
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 2008 Second IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE DEST 2008)
© 2008 IEEE.
el the relevant supporting systems. Specialised information and de- interfaces capable of simulating ‘change’ to validate our hypothes-
cision support systems depend on correspondingly specialised on- is.
tologies: medicine, aerospace, civil engineering. Pefferly, Jaeger
and Lo [17] in a recent study make the case for taking into account REFERENCES
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IX. VALIDATION OF THE APPROACH
[4]
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