Ecosystems Architecture

Preface vii
The Open Group Press vii
The Open Group vii
About the Authors viii
Contributors ix
Trademarks x
Acknowledgements xi
Foreword xii
Prologue xiv
History and Background xiv

1. From Enterprise to Ecosystem 1
1.1. Scale, Structure, and Human-Centric Purpose 4
1.2. Sociotechnical Systems 6
1.3. Within a Hairsbreadth of Enterprise? 7
1.4. Attributes and Components, then up through Systems and Enterprises, Followed by Nodes 8
1.5. Emergent Structure, Taoist Thinking, and Abstract Workspaces 9
1.6. Natural Successors 10

2. What is all the Fuss About? 12
2.1. Evolution Over Change in IT Systems (Universal Darwinism) 12
2.2. Things We Know About Complexity and Scale in Sociotechnical Ecosystems 14
2.3. Commerce and Ecosystems 16
2.4. Minimum Effort in Organization and Structure 16
2.5. How and Why Ecosystems Form 17
2.6. Business Response and Beyond 18
2.7. Revelation Not Revolution, and on to Emergent Intelligence 19
2.8. Pseudo Ecosystems and the Restricted Use of Collaboration Tools 21
2.9. Autocatalism and the Extremes of Complex Systems 22
2.10. Back Down to Earth 24

3. Tooling From First Principles — None of This is New 27
3.1. Model Driven Architecture 29
3.2. Toward an Ecosystems Framework 30
3.3. Graph Theory and Graphs 31
3.4. Graphs, Architectural Schematics, and Semantic Extensibility 34
3.5. Applying Measurement Systems to Graph Context 35
3.6. Continuous Cartesian Spaces 38
3.7. Vectors 39
3.8. Graph Node Comparison Using Vectors and Trigonometry 40
3.9. Cosine Similarity 43
3.10. Bringing This All Together 43
3.11. The Value of Vector Spaces in Modeling Ecosystems 45
3.12. Asset Approximation Using Vector Proximity 46
3.13. Star Gazing and the Search for Black Holes 47
3.14. GenAI 50
3.15. What Does this Mean for Architectural Practice and Tooling? 52
3.16. Limitations and Inference 56
3.17. GenAI Patterns for Ecosystems Architecture 57
3.18. So What? 59

4. That is All Well and Good — Coping Mechanisms. 62
4.1. Prior Art 62
4.2. Software Lifecyle Approaches 65
4.3. The VIE Framework 66
4.4. The Seeds of a Hyper-Enterprise New Method 67
4.5. Cells 67
4.6. From VIE to VIPER 69
4.7. The 7+1 Keys of Viable Enterprise Ecosystems 71
4.8. End Thoughts 72

5. Existing Ecosystems Thinking and Practice 73
5.1. Social Machines 73
5.2. Gaia-X 75
5.3. Semantic Web-Enabled Software Engineering 78
5.4. GenAI and Intermediate Modeling Languages 79
5.5. Quantum Semantics and Applied Quantum Computing 82
5.6. Feet Back on the Ground 86

6. Summary and Final Comments 88

Appendix A: Referenced Documents 93

Index 105