Understanding Digital Marketplace Business Models: An Ontology Approach

Digital marketplaces, including sharing economy platforms, are digital platforms that may operate under a large variety of business models. Business model variations are typically conceptualized in taxonomies, but these fall short in describing platform user roles and role-specific digital platform functionality. Reference ontologies offer more potential for capturing this information and thus provide a conceptual basis for model-driven development of platform software. This paper presents an extension of the Digital Platform Ontology (DPO) of Derave, Sales, Gailly and Poels (2020) that is agnostic to business model choices. We extend the DPO with digital platform business model ontology modules, based on an analysis of digital marketplace business models, that was informed by a literature review and a sample of existing digital marketplaces. The new ontology modules can be used as building blocks to model a digital marketplace operating under a chosen business model.

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