A SECO Meta-model: A Common Vocabulary of the SECO Research Domain

Abstract

Software development companies are venturing towards collaborative approach and software ecosystems (SECO) participation. Over the years, many papers have been written and different modelling languages were proposed to capture the interactions between the SECO participants. What is missing, however, is a comprehensive meta-model describing possible entities and relationships that constitute a SECO. The goal of this paper is to create a common language for academic researchers for software ecosystems by creating such a meta-model. We constructed the meta-model by extracting and grouping entities and relationships from research papers. The meta-model consists of 5 themes: actors and roles, products and platforms, boundaries, ecosystem health and strategy. We advocate that our meta-model allows for easy sharing and comparing of case studies and the generalization of results across studies. We present the results from initial expert evaluation of the meta-model.