Snooping Around a Fence: A Lesson from the Education Sector in a Software Service Ecosystem

Abstract

Although the education sector has recognized the value of information technologies since the early 1990s, the advancement of education services is not clearly shown in the information technology era. This paper visualizes the trace of education services development in a software service ecosystem with real data about software services and their combinations resulting in composite services. Our graphical analysis results show that education services continuously emerge through reusing and recombining popular software services such as Google Maps and Facebook, although only a few education software services open their functions and data to the ecosystem. Moreover, our analysis results show that there no service groups that are built around education services. Our findings suggest that the education sector is immature within the software service ecosystem and that a software service sector has not been formed yet.