Towards a Platform Architecture for Digital Content

Olga Levina

FZI Research Center for Information Technology, Friedrichstr. 60, Berlin, Germany

Keywords: Digital Infrastructure, Content Platform, Platform Architecture, Platform Design.

Abstract: Digital platforms are currently being studied from different angles by information system scientists, software

developers and economists, since they have shown their potential to disrupt business domains and create novel

approaches for various business models. Nevertheless, the formal definition and the technical description of

the platform as a digital infrastructure remain heterogenous among the disciplines as well as users. In this

paper, process and methods used to derive technical and governance requirements for a digital content

platform are described. Being rooted in the participatory action design research, the results provide a focused

definition as well as realization suggestions for the digital artefact that can be used to be mapped on other

disciplines as well as to the management of technical and governance-related aspects on digital infrastructures.

1 INTRODUCTION

Digital infrastructures offer a space for connecting

content, data, hardware and software that is generally

accessible over the online network. A digital platform

is one specification of such an infrastructure with the

focus on creating and making specific content usable

by interested parties. As such, it has the potential to

generate network effects as well as discussion-based,

i.e. open, innovations as defined by (Chesbrough,

2003), in the context of information services creation

or digital support. Principles and discussions on how

such an infrastructure can be designed and governed

has been one of the rising research topics in

Information Systems Research in the last decade,

confirming the status of digital platforms as

marketplaces as an essential part of the future

technology and economic development.

In this paper, we focus on the description of a

digital platform that acts as a content intermediary

with the goal to combine information applications and

services for the electricity and mobility domains, thus

providing a marketplace for the accordant actors and

a common ground for open innovation of information

services. The energy and mobility domains are

increasingly getting into focus in the context of the

environmental and governmental debates.

Nevertheless, they are mostly considered separately,

despite the growing number of topics that require

their conjoint analysis. Furthermore, both domains

are increasingly important in the context of urban

development and emerging services and

technologies. For the design and realization of the

envisioned platform, it is assumed that providing a

digital space for combining these domains will

benefit the development and sustainability of the

resulting information services. The engineering

problem addressed here is thus about how to

systematically develop a digital space that allows

content provision and its usage in urban context

considering multiple stakeholder groups including

technology, government and private industry. To

address these issues the Participatory Action Design

Research (PADR) approach is chosen. PADR

provides a framework that addresses the cross-

disciplinary challenges of the urban informatic

research (Bilandzic and Venable, 2011). This

research area is known to consider a multiplicity of

stakeholder groups into the development of the IT

artefact.

The presented artefact is a result and a digital

space for further participatory content development in

the urban mobility context. The platform is designed

to provide governed access and content curation for

the system users. The process of the architecture

development is outlined. It is based on the classic

process known from the systems analysis domain

(Satzinger et al., 2015) and structured software

design. Furthermore, a stakeholder and actor structure

is provided and the governance decision matrix is

described. Other methods used for platform

realization are use case and process design that serve

174

Levina, O.

Towards a Platform Architecture for Digital Content.

DOI: 10.5220/0006875501740181

In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications (ICETE 2018) - Volume 1: DCNET, ICE-B, OPTICS, SIGMAP and WINSYS, pages 174-181

ISBN: 978-989-758-319-3

as basis for the actual technical realization. This

approach was chosen as the digital content platform

is an information technology (IT) artefact as well as a

user-centred solution requiring a multi-disciplinary

view on its development. Therefore, it is suggested

that the described approach can be applied within

different domains where a marketplace for

information exchange needs to be developed. The

paper is structured accordingly. First the state of the

art on the current understanding of digital platforms

and infrastructures are established, then the design

process for the platform as well as the results are

described. Discussion of the applicability and current

experience with the design as well as the conclusion

finish the paper. Hence, the main contributions of this

paper are twofold: first the design process and its

results are described as a part of the participatory

action design research. Then, the applicability of the

design decisions is reflected on providing a starting

point for the development of reference architectures

in the area of digital infrastructures.

2 DIGITAL PLATFORMS- STATE

OF THE RESEARCH

A digital platform is defined by Tiwana et al., (2010)

as an extensible codebase of a software-based system

that provides core functionality shared by the

modules that interoperate with it and the interfaces

through which they interoperate. The authors also

point out that different notions of the platform

definition exist in different disciplines and outline

why the digital platform should be considered as an

Information Systems (IS) artefact: “platforms offer

the IS discipline an unusual opportunity to bring the

IT artifact into the core of theory development about

how platforms evolve and to contribute unique

insights distinctive from strategy, economics, and

software engineering” (p. 677). Digital platforms are

often positioned in the context of a digital ecosystem

(Ghazawneh and Henfridsson, 2011; Manner et al.,

2013; Rickmann et al., 2014; Schreieck, 2016;

Tiwana, 2013; Uludag et al., 2016). An ecosystem in

the ecology studies is defined as a dynamic complex

of communities and their environment that interact

with each other as a functional entity (Schulze et al.,

2005). In the context of a digital platform the other

communities are: the platform provider, platform

owner, platform user, i.e. consumer, as well as

technology, application and data providers, i.e.

developers of the platform content.

Another understanding of a digital platform

includes its consideration as an Internet intermediary

that not only provides a technical infrastructure and

the information management of the applications run

on it, but also presents the content that satisfies all the

active groups, i.e. actors, at the platform. The

provided content can originate from different sources

such as third parties, users or from the platform

provider (Perset, 2010). This is also the view that is

taken in this research. The goal of the platform as an

intermediary is to bring two sides of the information

market, i.e. the information suppliers and information

seekers, together and thus to create an added value.

Similar to the physical marketplace, a digital platform

needs to provide a functional environment to facilitate

the transactions as well as to create an environment

for trust. Additionally, catering to a specific

community requires definition and governance of the

chosen focus and community.

The ecosystem elements are interacting towards

the preservation and advancement of the success of

the platform. As platforms are affected by network

effects, the success of a platform is determined by

having enough participants on the development side

to attract the customer side and vice versa. These

stakeholder interests need to be aligned by the

platform governance. The definition of the digital

platform as an ecosystem provides valuable insights

into the potential stakeholder and governance

structure. Therefore, the existent research was

reviewed to derive these aspects. The

abovementioned platform content developers can be

detailed in sub-groups such as service providers, data

providers and application providers (Levina, 2016).

In the following, the design process of a technical

architecture for a digital platform that addresses the

domains of electricity and mobility information

services are described. The stakeholder structure as

well as the resulting requirements are presented. The

content construction is addressed in the works by

[blinded for review].

3 DESIGN PRINCIPLES

The presented artifact is the result of the Participatory

Action Design Research (PADR) approach that stems

from the urban informatics (Bilandzic and Venable,

2011) approach. This research method provides

valuable support when new technological means to

support everyday life in urban environments, e.g.

using mobile and ubiquitous computing, need to be

developed. Such research needs to recognize the

urban hybrid space as an ecology of people, place and

technology, thus handling multiple stakeholder

groups. Following this paradigm, we suggest a digital

Towards a Platform Architecture for Digital Content

175

platform that has been developed using open sources

technologies and that provides a digital open space

for urban content related to the mobility and

electricity issues.

From an engineering standpoint “a platform

design consists of a basic architecture, comprised of

sub-systems or modules and the interfaces between

these modules” (Meyer et al., 1997), (p. 91). For a

platform to provide added value for the implementing

domains, the modules need to profit from the

emerging network effects and be able to embed

different actor roles. Thus, the design and governance

structure of the envisioned content platform described

here are based on the four major principles:

 compatibility and adherence to the existing (open)

standards in the related domains,

 privacy- and security-by-design,

 user focus,

 content suitability.

While the technological standards describe the

general requirements towards the software and

hardware architecture, remaining aspects are directed

at the multi-disciplinary environment. Privacy and

security issues, often regarded as part of the IT

governance, are strongly dependent on the definition

of the actor roles that are involved into the design and

operation of the platform as well as the data that is

being exchanged, provided or stored in the platform

context. The platform is to be designed as an

interaction environment that supports informational

needs but also respects the prerogative of the

purposeful data transfer. Thus, privacy- and security-

by-design principles are realized by performing

several security and privacy related analysis. The

analysis processes were based on the existing security

and privacy requirement analysis approaches such as

SQUARE (Chen et al., 2004) and PIA (Wright and

De Hert, 2012).

To be able to provide end-users with information

from multiple sources it is important to define the

management of the produced and retrieved data. Here

a provider-based data management is suggested.

User-related data are stored and managed by the

application provider, while the platform delivers user

and developer authetification and identification. As a

result, the information is stored and accessed in silos

constituting a decentralized access to user data.

As for the information supply side, the platform

backbone focuses on the infrastructure provision,

developer management and on the accordant quality

of service aspects such as availability and reliability

of the technical infrastructure. To adhere the design

principles, a middleware was chosen that can be

adjusted and changed according to the requirements.

Such a realization can be achieved using a service-

oriented approach or, in our case, an agent-based

approach to the provided information services

(Luetzenberger et al., 2015) was taken due to the

practical considerations within the project partner

structure.

4 PLATFORM DESIGN:

PROCESS AND METHODS

USED

Figure 1 shows the platform development process,

adopted from the domains of systems analysis

(Checkland, 2000), software design (Curtis et al.,

1988) and urban informatics (Bilandzic and Venable,

2011), with regard to the different stages of the

solution development (top-down) and to the different

platform dimensions of each step (left-to-right). The

process is shown as a sequence of steps to allow its

formal description. In the implementation phase, the

process was realized as an iterative heuristic, which

steps were defined by the feedback from the

preceding steps.

Figure 1: Process of the Platform Design.

Before the actual design, an environment analysis

was performed to identify relevant stakeholders for

the content platform, the entities interacting on and

with the platform, potential technical solutions for the

envisioned infrastructure, existing informational

services and applications addressing the content

domains in question as well as the general market for

content platforms in energy and mobility domains.

The artefacts of this first step of diagnosing and

problem formulation, was an actor and interaction

diagram (see figure 2) as well as the coarse technical

architecture. The informational solutions that were

already developed by the project partners and on the

market, were included into an accordant portfolio and

released on the platform during the architecture test

ICE-B 2018 - International Conference on e-Business

176

phase, as elements of the action planning and action

taking phases of PADR. The stakeholder definition

laid the first step towards role-based security and

privacy modelling that was crucial for the developer

guidelines and governance definition. Also,

stakeholder definition allowed for the first summary

of the requirements and expectations towards the

digital artefact. From the stakeholder analysis, main

roles interacting with the platform were defined. The

definition of roles within a platform ecosystem is an

important factor of the ecosystem design (Schreieck,

2016) and covers different aspect of the interactions

on the platform, such as ownership regimes (Bakos

and Katsamakas, 2008) and distribution of power

between the stakeholders (Bullinger et al., 2011).

Figure 2: Roles and Interactions on the content platform.

Figure 2 shows the roles involved and their

possible interaction with the platform. Data and

service providers, i.e. energy or mobility provider or

accordant devices, upload their content on the

platform for the application provider to access.

Application and service providers can use the data

and enhance them to derive useful information and

present it in a software application that is used by the

end-user, i.e. application (app) user. Given this

scenario and the assumption that the value of the

platform increases with the number of members for

each role, network effects are created justifying our

platform approach.

Figure 3: Excerpt form the governance decision matrix.

A decision matrix was created and is shown in its

excerpt in figure 3 to define the responsibilities and

requirements from the actors involved, also serving

as a rough governance outline that was later

specified in technical, legal or user requirements.

A UML use case diagram (Simsion and Witt,

2004) was constructed using actor roles defined in the

stakeholder analysis and the fist requirements

towards the platform. The use case diagram also

allowed a first review of the required versus already

realized functions that were set to support the

interactions on the platform. These functions were

realized using the JAVA agents, but other similar

realizations such as using (web) services or libraries

are also possible. The use cases also enabled the

definition of the core modules and accordant security

measures required by the actors. Thus, the

responsibilities were able to be divided between the

platform provider and platform owner.

Once the core use cases for the actors and the

platform were defined in workshops with future users

and developers, the core processes on the platform

were modelled according to the use cases using the

UML activity diagram that was later transformed into

a BPMN diagram as shown in the example in figure

After the technical architecture was set up, the

frontend development was started. Here, methods

form the UX domain such as interviews, surveys and

storytelling were used to define potential information

services and their realization.

Figure 4: Process for the use case developer registration.

Technology analysis included collecting and

discussing the requirements for the hardware and

software that were needed to realize the digital

content platform on the planned scale. Here, the

technological approaches for the realization of a

distributed architecture as well as distributed

applications were reviewed. Technological

approaches such as frontend development

frameworks were reviewed to include the application

development and integration in the search. The results

were obtained via market and technology analysis as

well as the inventory of the current resources among

the project partners. The platform itself consists of

Towards a Platform Architecture for Digital Content

177

both, the network and storage components as well as

the regulatory content such as application

programming interface (API) description, developer

guidelines and the general governance statements.

The service and application providers submit their

artefacts to the platform using defined APIs and

adhering to the design, usability and security settings

documented in the accordant governance guidelines.

Building on the gathered picture of the state of the

art technological potentials, the requirements on

usability and content from the main stakeholders and

actor groups were collected. Here interviews and

workshops were applied as methods to derive the

requirements. The meeting minutes were then

examined towards the feasibility, focus and

redundancy of the mentioned aspects. The remaining

content was then mapped on the state of the art

definition as well as the realization potential in the

given context. Additionally, further use cases were

designed and discussed with potential users and

developers that were then matched on the found

informational solutions. A criteria matrix was

designed to capture the technological requirements,

stakeholder requirements as well as the requirements

stemming from the design principles and their

realization potential. These requirements were then

ranked according to several criteria, such as their

realization potential, originating stakeholder role,

future maintenance potential, openness (e.g. for

standards), and their sustainability for the further

course of the project.

The phase of the solution development in figure 1

included the final technology selection. Hence, a

server was chosen instead of a virtualization solution,

agent-based middleware was adjusted to the needs of

the web development technologies and a web

development framework was chosen for the

implementation and presentation of the platform.

Communication protocols were implemented as well

as the security-related aspects introduced according

to the derived actor model as shown in figure 2.

As a digital content platform needed to be

developed, the content design was a large part of the

governance definition beside the guidelines and the

privacy and security aspects. Finally, the use case and

requirement fits were conducted to determine further

steps in the platform realization.

One of the main challenges for the platform

design is to aggregate and present the manifold

content and make it securely accessible for the user in

the intuitive and manageable way. To adhere to the

informational needs of both of the domains as well as

to the stakeholders, a requirement-based governance

structure was developed. Here, the definition of

platform governance by (Tiwana, 2013) as:

“partitioning of decision-making authority between

platform owners and app developers, control

mechanisms, and pricing and pie-sharing structures”

is adopted. Schreieck et al., (2016) summarize the

tasks of the governance structure as being the

combination of technologic and marketing views on

one hand and integration and description of the main

concepts on the other hand. Hence, besides the

directly related content on electricity and mobility,

several EMAS sustainability indicators (EMAS,

2015) such as pollution, greenhouse gas emissions,

waste and water usage were taken as example,

providing information support for a more

sustainability conscious behaviour. For the derivation

of potential content for the envisioned platform, a

systematic approach based on classification

development of digital services was chosen and

described in [blinded for review]. To derive an

approach for content curation and selection the

current literature on mobile service design (Golding

and Donaldson, 2009; Stanoevska-Slabeva and

Hoegg, 2005; Walravens, 2013), platform design (Rui

and Whinston, 2011; Schreieck, 2016; Selic, 2008;

Tiwana, 2013) as well as modularization approaches

for mobile services (Schreieck et al., 2016) were

reviewed. The insights are implemented in the

creation of the content governance concept for a real-

life digital platform that is created to unify the

domains of electricity and mobility as described in

[blinded for review].

5 REALIZING A DIGITAL

CONTENT PLATFORM FOR

ELECTRICITY AND MOBILITY

Here, the realization of the digital content platform

based on the design principles and technology

described above is outlined. The realization focused

on an efficient and secured communication,

scalability and application integration. The platform

is aimed at providing an interaction environment that

supports informational needs but also respects the

prerogative of the purposeful and secure data transfer.

To be able to provide end-users with information

from multiple sources it is important to define the

management of the produced and retrieved data. Here

a provider-based data management approach is

suggested. User-related data are stored and managed

by the application provider, while the platform

delivers user and developer authentication and

identification. As a result, the information is stored

ICE-B 2018 - International Conference on e-Business

178

and accessed in silos constituting a decentralized

access to user data. Beside the hardware

infrastructure, the platform consists of a homepage

that shows the available information services as well

as provides the possibility to register or login for

personalization of the shown content. This frontend

was realized as a progressive web application

(Google Developers, 2017) to provide a better

usability on mobile devices.

As the platform is supposed to bridge the

electricity and mobility domains through information,

content offered by the applications needs to be closely

observed. It does not only comprise usage of

electricity, CO2-footprint or mobility related

services, it also opens the possibility to gain insights

on other factors of sustainability such as community

life by realizing discussion and news forums as well

as gamification.

By adopting these principles for our design

approach, we affiliate with the research by

(Checkland, 2000) and (Curtis et al., 1998), who state

that to follow the primary objectives of an IT-

platform such as establishing a large user base or

being profitable, a formalized and authority-based

governance structure is needed. Whereas the

secondary objectives can be fulfilled by trust-based

and informal control.

5.1 Applications

The software applications are the focus of the

considered platform. While the technical and

hardware infrastructure serve as enablers, the

applications are the focus of the interaction and the

raison d’etre of the actual platform. Their quantity

and quality are crucial for the platform success that is

defined by the involvement of the users and

developers. Therefore, an extended effort to define

the information services needed or envisioned by the

end-users from both of the domains was made with

the assumption that this first set of applications would

trigger open innovation in term of combination and

realization of further information need. Although, this

assumption remains to be proven over the course of

the project.

After conducting the literature review and a

workshop with a group of potential future users, all

the categories for the mobility domain identified by

Schreieck et al., (2016) were deemed as relevant for

content provision on the platform. Furthermore, using

the morphological box for mobility (Levina and

Kranich, 2016), the categories were integrated into

the domain specific classification. Thus, a more

thorough analysis of the potential content or

information use would be possible. Also, building on

a short review of electro mobility digital services, it

became clear that a straightforward consolidation of

the identified categories of the two domains

electricity and mobility would not provide any

substantial benefit for the consumer of the mobility

and electricity content. They focus on the navigation

and payment functionalities for electric cars, which

are being one representative of the mobility domain

using electricity in one specific way [blinded for

review]. After the workshops with future users that

included story telling sessions, slightly modified

mobility and energy services emerged. These were

preliminary described as “special logistics

management tool”, “mobility coach tool” as well as

“multi-modal navigation tool”. The latter included the

navigation possibility from the charging station to the

point of interest as well as the inclusion of the

autonomous shuttle service into the route calculation

emerged. Building on these insights, a first set of

services and for the platform was designed and

uploaded for the prototypic use.

5.2 Middleware

The middleware provides auxiliary functions for the

connectivity between the technical infrastructure and

the application software. It is also used to implement

security and other general features, such as analytics

and interfaces, for the platform. The interfaces define

the integration of potential devices or applications

onto the platform. Here we use the Java Intelligent

Agent Componentware agent framework, JIAC V, to

implement the middleware functions. JIAC was

developed under the premise to narrow the

discrepancy between research and industry. Its goal

was to provide a robust communication infrastructure

beyond the borders of homogeneous computer

networks. The modular assembly of JIAC agents

allows for multi-agent system solutions that are

tailored to the application context (Luetzenberger et

al., 2015). Among the industry requirements that the

agent-based middleware fulfils are: stability and

robustness that support the user experience,

deploying and undeploying of new services or agents,

managing of large number of nodes and agents

without a decrease in performance, third-party service

integration, component reuse as well as interface

management. These are the same requirements that

were identified during the requirements analysis with

the stakeholders. Given the availability of the JIAC

architecture from our project partner as well as its

application in distributed architecture context, we

adopted the agents to the web-based frontend

Towards a Platform Architecture for Digital Content

179

development therefore allowing its integration into

the planned architecture. We used Bootstrap 4.0 as a

CSS framework as well as jquery UI for the frontend

development. The APIs were realized using

representational state transfer (REST) paradigm.

5.3 Hardware Technical Infrastructure

To realize the software functions, a network

architecture as well as the database realizations were

needed. The rising degree of virtualization of the

technical infrastructure allows for an establishment of

the server as well as the database in the cloud, i.e.

without the purchase and installation of the actual

hardware. Nevertheless, we used a physical server

with a virtual machine for the platform operation. We

use 16 GB RAM and 4 CPUs with 60 GB of memory

for the virtual machine. MySQL was used to

integrated and communicate with the database. Each

of these layers requires a thorough analysis and

definition of the governance rules. Their distribution

among the actors is dependent on the business and

role models chosen for the platform realization. The

communication with the backend was realized using

jquery and direct AJAX requests and JSON formatted

replies.

6 CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK

A design approach and guiding design principles for

a platform that joins information needs for mobility

and electricity domains were introduced here. The

design as well as the requirements analysis were

grounded in the process of systems analysis and

classic software development. By describing the

design principles, the process as well as the methods

used to derive the final digital platform design, a

contribution to the body of knowledge on platform

realization and operation is made. Building on these

insights, platforms from other domains can be

constructed. Urban informatics engages in

understanding and analyzing a wide spectrum of

issues from the everyday context, needs in the urban

setting as well as targets the public as end users of the

created artefact. Therefore, the research method from

this domain was chosen to develop the presented

content platform.

Coming to full realization, the platform is

expected to fuel the use of the district-scale

experimentation environment among the researchers,

service providers and end-users. This digital

infrastructure joins context specific service and

application developers with end- consumers.

Bridging the two domains towards a common goal

provides the first coarse definition of a common

ecosystem.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was sponsored by German Ministry for

Research and Economics (BMBF) as a part of the

Forschungscampus initiative, specifically

Forschungscampus “Mobility2Grid” under the grant

number: 03SF0522A.

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