  Service-based IT infrastructures are today's trend and the future for every
enterprise willing to support dynamic and agile business to contend with the
ever changing e-demands and requirements. A digital ecosystem is an emerging
business IT model for developing agile e-enterprises made out of
self-adaptable, self-manageable, self-organizing, and sustainable service
components. This paper defines the specifications of a communication language
for exchanging data between connecting entities in digital ecosystems. It is
called ECL short for Ecosystem Communication Language and is based on XML to
format its request and response messages. An ECU short for Ecosystem
Communication Unit is also presented which interprets, validates, parses ECL
messages and routes them to their destination entities. ECL is open and
provides transparent, portable, and interoperable communication between the
different heterogeneous distributed components to send requests, and receive
responses from each other, regardless of their incompatible protocols,
standards, and technologies. As future research, digital signature for ECL is
to be investigated so as to deliver data integrity as well as message
authenticity for the digital ecosystem.
