eBusiness Models : Ontology and Classification (Modelli Di E-Business: Ontologia E Tassonomica Della Ricerca)

The proliferation of research on e-business models, by academics and practitioners, asserts a claim for the definition and classification of the many contributions on the topic, in order to clarify both the ontological domain and the state of the art of research. The extent of contributes on e-business brings the danger of unclear definitions, boundaries and scopes, a risk generated also by the overlapping of similar concepts during different periods of the short but intense history of the application of Internet in the business world. In the first part, this article intends to formulate a scheme of e-business models through the conceptual construction of a hierarchical structure which includes the relevant entities, the relations, the rules, the axioms and the specific constraints of the e-business model domain. The remaining part of the article analyses some of the main contributions in the international literature and its research streams, in order to contextualize the state of the art of the studies on e-business models by creating a taxonomy according to the contents of the literature overviewed