Humans and Complex Systems: Sustainable Information Societies

Conclusions Advanced information systems are crucial in many applications. An important such application is to maintain a sustainable ecosystem on our earth. However, emergence of information systems of that complexity calls for new methodologies in software engineering that take a holistic view of the systems and their embedding in our social and natural fabric. In fact, the metaphor of information ecologies gives us the language and concepts with which to address challenges of high complexity, such as networks of people and smart information artifacts communicating and sharing knowledge. Thus, the ultimate goal can be phrased as: Development of a comprehensive methodology supporting sustainable information ecologies. This chapter has given an introduction to this topic and an illustration of some ideas in an e-Health application. We believe that the main ideas expressed are valid but much work remains to be done. Furthermore, we believe that there will be many fruitful interactions (ideas and methodologies) between researchers addressing both kinds of ecologies: natural and artificial. The work presented derives from fruitful collaboration within our research group SoC as well with colleagues in national and international projects, such as SmartCare, Alfebiite, NoE AgentLink II and NoE Ontoweb.