Towards a meta-model for data ecosystems

Data Ecosystems are socio-technical networks that enable collaboration between autonomous actors such as enterprises, institutions, and individuals. While Data Ecosystems are thus gaining importance, research into Data Ecosystems is still in its infancy stages. The terminology and definitions for Data Ecosystem vary greatly. This diversity imposes a pressing problem for the development of a clear understanding of the new opportunities and emergent challenges in exploiting Data Ecosystems. Accurate definitions are required to get a mutual understanding of what Data Ecosystems involve. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, a model for describing a Data Ecosystem and its essential concepts has not been proposed yet. In this work, we aim to fill these gaps by reviewing the Data Ecosystem literature, and based on the field literature, we propose a meta-model for describing Data Ecosystems. In particular, the proposed meta-model describes the Data Ecosystem fundamental concepts and their inter-relationships for enabling analysis and description of ecosystems. Especially, the meta-model declares explicitly how all these concepts are related to each other in such holistic view, hence facilitating knowledge creation and management in the ecosystem.