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ecoxight: Discovery, Exploration, and Analysis of Business Ecosystems Using Interactive Visualization

Published: 24 April 2018 Publication History

Abstract

The term ecosystem is used pervasively in industry, government, and academia to describe the complex, dynamic, hyperconnected nature of many social, economic, and technical systems that exist today. Ecosystems are characterized by a large, dynamic, and heterogeneous set of geospatially distributed entities that are interconnected through various types of relationships. This study describes the design and development of ecoxight, a Web-based visualization platform that provides multiple coordinated views of multipartite, multiattribute, dynamic, and geospatial ecosystem data with novel and rich interaction capabilities to augment decision makers ecosystem intelligence. The design of ecoxight was informed by an extensive multiphase field study of executives. The ecoxight platform not only provides capabilities to interactively explore and make sense of ecosystems but also provides rich visual construction capabilities to help decision makers align their mental model. We demonstrate the usability, utility, and value of our system using multiple evaluation studies with practitioners using socially curated data on the emerging application programming interface ecosystem. We report on our findings and conclude with research implications. Collectively, our study contributes to design science research at the intersection of information systems and strategy and the rapidly emerging field of visual enterprise analytics.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems
ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems  Volume 9, Issue 2
Regular Papers and Research Commentary
June 2018
113 pages
ISSN:2158-656X
EISSN:2158-6578
DOI:10.1145/3210372
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 24 April 2018
Accepted: 01 January 2018
Revised: 01 November 2017
Received: 01 March 2017
Published in TMIS Volume 9, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Network visualization
  2. geospatial data
  3. multipartite graph
  4. temporal network

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