Architecting a service-oriented rural platform: Improving rural economic climate through participation in the digital business ecosystem

Improving the rural economic climate to narrow the rural-urban economic gap is necessary in order to address the problematic urbanization phenomenon in many developing countries. To this end, the participation of rural communities in the digital business ecosystem is being viewed as a promising approach. However, there are high barriers that hinder rural communities from participating in the digital business ecosystem. The barriers are mainly due to the low digital readiness of the rural communities, the limited government capability, and the limited third-party involvement. With an aim to lower these barriers, our paper proposes the architectural specification of a digital platform based on a service-oriented architecture, where the provisioning of digital business services for rural communities is realized through a collaboration between the government and third-party service providers. The proposed architecture has been instantiated by means of a prototype and validated by a panel of experts from the rural areas of West Java, Indonesia.