Digital ecosystems and comparison to existing collaboration environment

Digital ecosystems transcend the traditional rigorously defined collaborative environments from centralised, or distributed or hybrid models into an open, flexible, domain cluster, demand-driven interactive environment. A digital ecosystem is new-networked architecture and collaborative environment that addresses the weakness of client-server, peer-to-peer and web services. As it is such a new concept, people often assume that it is a type of multi-agent system, or that it is a computer based economic solution or uses a computer to study the ecological system, etc. In this paper, we will give an overview of digital ecosystems and compare it to existing client-server, peer-to-peer, Grid, web-services environments