World Semantic Foundation: Ecosystem Ontology

Status: Candidate / Investigating, per the WSF Change Control Lifecycle. Proposed repository name: wsf-ecosystem, in the World-Semantic-Foundation organisation. Upstream location: https://github.com/World-Semantic-Foundation/wsf-ecosystem

This repository provides a complete, WSF-conformant semantic foundation for the Ecosystem domain. It establishes the foundational concept Ecosystem as a Tier 3 worked example specialisation of wsf:System, and grounds within that concept the full domain ontology required for strategy, platform economics, governance, lifecycle management, and health measurement of business and digital ecosystems.

The repository contributes nine coherent bodies of content to the WSF foundation.

1. Three Tier 3 specialisations of foundational WSF concepts: Ecosystem (worked example, parent wsf:System), Business Ecosystem (specialisation of Ecosystem), Digital Business Ecosystem (specialisation of Business Ecosystem).
2. Six actor roles as further Tier 3 specialisations of wsf:Actor: Orchestrator (Keystone), Complementor (Niche Player), Dominator (degraded variant of Orchestrator), Gatekeeper (Curator), Prosumer (hybrid), Boundary Spanner.
3. Six structural primitives as Tier 3 specialisations: Platform, Marketplace, Boundary Resources (Gawer), Modularity, Interoperability Standards, Coupling Level.
4. Eight value dynamics as Tier 3 specialisations: Network Effect with Direct (Same-Side) and Indirect (Cross-Side) subtypes, Value Co-creation, Value Exchange, Value Slippage, Switching Costs, Lock-In.
5. Five governance mechanisms as Tier 3 specialisations: Governance (parent), Decision Rights Allocation, Coopetition, Incentive Alignment, Trust Mechanisms.
6. Four lifecycle stages per James F. Moore's model: Birth, Expansion, Leadership, Self-Renewal or Death.
7. Three health metrics per the Iansiti and Levien framework, parented to the Ecosystem Health disposition: Productivity, Robustness, Niche Creation.
8. Fifteen relational properties (the "verbs") filed under the wsf-rel-eco: namespace, governed by six modelling rules that ensure correct treatment of overlapping roles, coopetition, network effects as relational properties (not actor attributes), lifecycle time-qualification, coupling degree, and value flow directionality.
9. One worked example drawn from the canonical OTCHERE Inc enterprise: the OTCHERE Platform Ecosystem, with full health assessment and lifecycle-stage analysis.

The Ecosystem domain is grounded in four intersecting lines of literature, harmonised through WSF's primitive taxonomy.

• Ecology and business strategy. The ecosystem metaphor in management traces to Moore (1993), "Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition," which established both the lifecycle model and the keystone/dominator framing adopted in this repository.
• Platform economics. Rochet and Tirole's two-sided market theory, and Iansiti and Levien's "Keystone Advantage" (2004), supply the keystone/dominator role pair and the three health metrics (Productivity, Robustness, Niche Creation).
• Platform governance. Gawer's research on platforms and boundary resources supplies the operational construct by which an Orchestrator enables Complementors without reimplementing the platform.
• Coopetition. Brandenburger and Nalebuff supply the game-theoretic treatment that requires Coopetition to be modelled as the co-existence of cooperative and competitive predicates between the same actor pair at different layers, not as a single predicate.

The repository reconciles these lines and binds them to WSF Tier 1 primitives (Entity, Relationship, Event, State, Disposition, Proposition, Assertion, Context, Time, Space). Every concept in this repository is a Tier 3 specialisation of one of those primitives. No concept is elevated to Tier 1, because every domain concept in scope can be derived from existing primitives without loss of meaning, in conformance with Foundational Principle 2 (Minimal Foundation).

The repository designates Ecosystem as a Tier 3 worked example, in the same sense that wsf:Capability is a worked example in the existing WSF vocabulary. The designation rests on four observations.

• Ecosystem is the root concept of an entire domain vocabulary. All other domain concepts (actors, platforms, value dynamics, governance, lifecycle, health) specialise from or relate to it.
• Ecosystem demonstrates the full specialisation chain. Tier 1 (wsf:System) to Tier 3 worked example (Ecosystem) to further Tier 3 specialisations (Business Ecosystem, Digital Business Ecosystem) and onward to the actor taxonomy, structural primitives, and value dynamics.
• Ecosystem requires a relational layer. No other Tier 3 concept in WSF requires fifteen object properties with six modelling rules. The relational grammar is filed under concepts/relationships/.
• Ecosystem carries the explanatory load of the entire domain. The worked example treatment ensures the concept receives the rigour of ADR-WSF-20 §14 metadata, full positive/negative/borderline cases, and a canonical instance drawn from the OTCHERE example vocabulary.

The full reasoning per concept is recorded in governance/TIER-CLASSIFICATION-MATRIX.md. The headline.

• Tier 1: no new concepts proposed. Every domain concept composes from existing Tier 1 primitives without loss of meaning.
• Tier 2: no new constructs proposed. Epistemic scaffolding needs (identifier, namespace, term, definition, evidence, provenance, authority) are already covered by the existing WSF Tier 2 vocabulary.
• Tier 3: twenty-four concepts, each parented to a Tier 1 primitive with identifiable conditions, constraints, and mechanism template (trigger, effect, applicable contexts).
• Worked example: one (Ecosystem), with the rationale set out in §3.

The tier-classification matrix is the audit trail: every placement cites the validation check applied, and every rejected promotion to a higher tier cites the irreducibility failure.

This section documents how the vocabulary, concepts, and classifications in this repository trace to the source documents that produced them. The lineage is recorded so that every substantive claim can be audited against its origin.

The argument chain runs from the source documents through the investigation findings in research/ to the concept files in concepts/. The chain is recorded in four investigation findings.

1. Source reconciliation (research/01-source-reconciliation/) maps each concept surfaced by the source documents to its lineage in the Moore, Iansiti-Levien, Gawer, Rochet-Tirole, and Brandenburger-Nalebuff literature, and to its lineage in the WSF Tier 1 primitives. The reconciliation table is the audit trail for the 39 distinct concepts proposed in this repository.

2. Tier classification rationale (research/02-tier-classification/) applies the four-check validation framework to every concept and records the rejection of Tier 1 and Tier 2 placement with reasoning. The classification matrix in governance/TIER-CLASSIFICATION-MATRIX.md is the auditable summary.

3. Relationship grammar (research/03-relationship-grammar/) establishes the fifteen relational properties (the "verbs") of ecosystem ontology with their domain, range, mathematical properties, and six modelling rules. The grammar is the basis for the wsf-rel-eco: namespace reservation.

4. Modelling risks (research/04-modelling-risks/) catalogues the ten modelling risks in formalising the ecosystem domain against WSF, with mitigations and three open issues flagged for upstream ADR resolution.

Three substantive departures from the source documents are recorded here as applied intelligence, so that the lineage of the reasoning is visible.

1. Dominator is specialisation-of-Orchestrator, not specialisation-of-Actor. The Iansiti-Levien framing treats Dominator and Keystone as parallel actor types. The WSF modelling treats Dominator as a degraded state of Orchestrator so that the keystone-to-dominator drift can be expressed as a transition between the two states with provenance, rather than as a separate taxonomy. The reasoning is in concepts/tier-3/dominator.md and research/02-tier-classification/.

2. Network Effect is a Disposition of the actor network, not an attribute of any single firm. The economics literature treats network effects as a property of platforms or firms. The WSF modelling treats Network Effect as a disposition of the actor network (Platform + Complementors + Users) so that the relational property exhibits can attach the effect to the network itself. The reasoning is in concepts/tier-3/network-effect.md and research/03-relationship-grammar/ (Rule R3).

3. Coopetition is modelled as the co-existence of cooperates_with and competes_with between the same actor pair at different layers. The Brandenburger-Nalebuff framing treats coopetition as a strategic stance. The WSF modelling treats it as a state plus a relational pattern, so that the cooperative and competitive relations can be asserted separately with layer context. The reasoning is in concepts/tier-3/coopetition.md and research/03-relationship-grammar/ (Rule R2).

• The full lineage from VOCAB-000 v2.0 and ADR-CONCEPTS-01 to the concept files in this repository is documented in research/01-source-reconciliation/FINDING-Source-Reconciliation.md.
• The ADR plan that this repository is intended to ground is documented in governance/ADR-PLAN.md.
• The diagrams in diagrams/ (Mermaid source, reproducible per CR-WSF-17 Rev.1 §14) reflect the current concept map and lifecycle state space.

This repository is at status Candidate / Investigating in WSF terms. Every concept is at the corresponding lifecycle stage. The next moves are recorded and tracked as GitHub Issues in the World-Semantic-Foundation/wsf-ecosystem repository.

1. Reconcile this workspace against the four layered tier-validation checks documented in research/02-tier-classification/.
2. File the three top-level proposals under proposals/ as investigation findings, preparatory to raising ADRs.
3. Draft and raise ADRs for Ecosystem (worked example), the actor taxonomy, the value dynamics, and the structural primitives.
4. Draft and raise Change Requests for the additions to wsf-spec/ (the fifteen wsf-rel-eco: predicates, the SHACL shapes, the JSON Schema, the Protobuf messages, the Turtle vocabulary, and the OWL/RDF skeleton for the twenty-four classes).
5. Mirror the OTCHERE worked example to wsf-examples/ for cross-repo consistency.

• Moore, J. F. (1993), "Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition," Harvard Business Review. Source of the ecosystem metaphor and lifecycle model.
• Iansiti, M., and Levien, R. (2004), The Keystone Advantage. Source of the keystone/dominator role pair and the Productivity, Robustness, Niche Creation metrics.
• Gawer, A. Research on platforms and boundary resources. Source of the Boundary Resources construct.
• Rochet, J. C., and Tirole, J. Two-sided market theory. Source of the Marketplace foundations.
• Brandenburger, A., and Nalebuff, B. Coopetition. Source of the cooperative-competitive co-existence treatment.
• Source artifacts in this repository. research/01-source-reconciliation/FINDING-Source-Reconciliation.md provides the full lineage mapping between the upstream source documents and this repository's concept files.

This repository is governed by the World Semantic Foundation's 12 Foundational Principles, its 27 Architectural Decision Records, and the Change Control Lifecycle. Contributions flow through ADRs and CRs filed as GitHub Issues.