The natural distributed character of software ecosystems calls for a shared
conceptualization and language to describe their architec- ture and their
evolution. In this regards, ontologies play a central role. In this paper: we
argue in favor of such an approach by show- ing that there is succesful
experience applying ontologies to the fields of software engineering and
software architecture; show the issues arising in ecosystem evolution and the
needs for higher lev- els of formalization of the description of such
processes; finally, we present a roadmap to develop an ontology for this area.