Case for Digital Epidemiology

The term “digital ecosystem” was first used in 2002 in a discussion paper by the European Commission, to provide a conceptual framework for the programmatic support for the adoption and development of Information and Communication Technology among member states [1]. The Commission defined the term as a “digital environment” populated by “digital species” which could be software components, applications, services, knowledge, business models, training modules, contractual frameworks, laws, etc.” While at the time the Commission's reference was narrowly focused on the “digital business ecosystem”, today the reference has spread to other types of ecosystems [2]. This presentation provides a case for the application of epidemiological techniques (of investigation, analysis and theory formulation) to build knowledge about the “health” of different digital ecosystems. The specialty field of “digital epidemiology” should (initially) focus on determining the types of conditions that need to be monitored and documented through surveillance or through the use of secondary data (such as data gathered for forensic analysis), and proceed to evaluating the implementation of standard epidemiologic techniques to provide insight into the wellbeing of "digital collectives" (i.e., populations) and/or apply distributional analysis to the various components of a digital ecosystems by determining appropriate units of analyses, and levels of aggregations. An example of the application of such analysis is demonstrated using secondary data sources of security vulnerability reports of a selected software system. The risks are presented both as aggregate (application level risk) and stratified by relevant sub-domain of the application.