Visualizing the Geography of Platform Boundary Resources:

The Case of the Global API Ecosystem

Jukka HuhtamäkiRahul C. Basole

Kaisa StillMartha G. Russell Marko Seppänen

http://bit.ly/apiglobal2017presohttp://bit.ly/apiglobal2017paper

Introduction

Why APIs?• APIs are replacing “traditional” interfirm

relationships• APIs are lightweight boundary resources that

allow for complementors to create value for the focal companies

• APIs are artifacts of both lightweight software development and business strategy

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API vs. platform economy

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03.05.2023 7Biswarup Ganguly, CC BY 3.0

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(Evans and Basole, 2016; Basole, 2016)

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(Evans and Basole, 2016; Basole, 2016)

Why Geography?• Digitization is eliminating “distance” and

therefore one can assume that geography would have a smaller role

• At the same time, we see that large companies continue to be co-located

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We asked• Where are APIs located geographically*? • Is the geographical location of a company

less important in the digital age?

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Method• Data collection using crawling and scraping• Data-driven visual network analytics• Semi-automated data curation process

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Data curation• 13,366 APIs and 6,271 mashups from

ProgrammableWeb• Using URIs as identifiers, company location

lookup using Crunchbase• Mapping the 6,218 APIs with location data to

city-level entrepreneurial regions and global regions

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Results–two levels of analysis1. Where are the APIs available globally?2. How are APIs co-used between regions?

H

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API Co-use• Cf. co-citation analysis

Three resulting connections (here regions):

Twitter - Twitter SearchTwitter - Google App EngineTwitter Search - Google App Engine

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Regions connected on basis of API co-use

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Regions connected on basis of API co-use

Conclusions

Takeaways• API ecosystem is highly concentrated to a

few regions• API ecosystem is particularly flexible for

actors to offer and consume services• API co-use is not API usage• Public APIs vs. Private APIs

Future work• Investigating the internal company-level network

structure of entrepreneurial regions• Introducing dynamics to the analysis: API diffusion

studies• How policy makers can facilitate the emergence of

national and e.g. European API ecosystem?• How will the changes in international data governance

policy impact the API ecosystem?

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