Abstract
A sharing platform is a digital platform that facilitates access to underutilized goods by renting or lending them to others. Users become less dependent on ownership which improves efficiency, sustainability, and the sense of community. The Sharing Economy (SE) is considered a complex domain because value co-creation can occur between multiple types of platform users. Developing platform software that offers the right functionality for the intended digital platform is therefore challenging. To address this complexity, an ontology can be utilized, which is an explicit specification of a conceptualization that provides a controlled vocabulary and shared meaning regarding a domain. The use of a sharing platform ontology allows for more effective communication and knowledge sharing amongst stakeholders in platform development and eventually drives the platform software development process. However, currently, it is not known how to develop such an ontology. In previous research, we developed the Digital Platform Ontology (DPO) and an extension of the DPO for describing platform business model choices. The DPO describes the digital platform domain in terms of digital platform types, including sharing platforms. However, a method to use the DPO and its business model extension for developing an organization-specific ontology that describes the functionality and business model of a specific existing or intended sharing platform was lacking. In this paper, we develop such a method using the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) and demonstrate it using a proof-of-concept based on the BlaBlaCar and Couchsurfing platforms.
Highlights
The platform economy refers to activities in business, culture, and social interaction that are performed on or are intermediated by digital platforms [1]
We validate if classes of all Digital Platform Ontology (DPO) modules for sharing platforms are used in Figure 6, which is a necessity to capture all constraints of the Sharing Economy (SE) domain
This paper presents a method developed using the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) and demonstrated with a proof-ofconcept on how to develop two types of ontologies that both have their use in the Sharing
Summary
The platform economy refers to activities in business, culture, and social interaction that are performed on or are intermediated by digital platforms [1]. The digitalization of the SE has enormously decreased transaction costs and free-riding behavior between unknown others [3,4] Due to this technological evolution, sharing platforms including BlaBlaCar and Couchsurfing have recently emerged as a viable alternative to fulfilling a variety of consumer needs, ranging from car-sharing to tools renting to overnight accommodations that were previously provided by firms [5]. The DPO is specified using OntoUML [18], a conceptual modelling language that is capable of representing the objects, events, and social entities of UFO. The models discussed in this paper are created using the OntoUML plugin for Visual Paradigm This plugin supports UFO-A (i.e., an ontology of objects), UFO-B (i.e., an ontology of events), and UFO-MLT (i.e., an ontology for categorization using multi-level theory) [17,19,20]. The plugin uses colors to indicate the origin of the stereotypes: UFO-A stereotypes that have their origin in kinds are represented in red while the ones that originated in relators and have the ability to connect two or more kinds are represented in green; UFO-B stereotypes are represented in yellow and UFO-MLT types in purple
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