A Domain Ontology for Platform Ecosystems

Platforms have disrupted several business sectors and daily life in general. Platforms facilitate collaboration between different partners, which leads to the emergence of an ecosystem. During recent years, both research fields platforms and ecosystems have made significant progress. Since the terminologies originate from different backgrounds and are put into play in various sectors, a certain vagueness surrounds platforms and ecosystems. The present paper, therefore, adds to academia by providing an ontology - an abstraction of a real-world phenomenon - for platform ecosystems. The ontology comprises concepts from the platforms, business ecosystems, and platform ecosystems domains. The evaluation with three real-world platform ecosystems from different industries verifies that the platform-ecosystem-specific requirements were met in the ontology.