FedMark: A Marketplace for Federated Data on the Web

TL;DR

FedMark introduces a marketplace model for the Web of Data that enables commercial data providers to monetize their data and allows customers to buy data from multiple sources, fostering sustainable growth.

Contribution

The paper presents FedMark, a novel marketplace framework for the Web of Data, including two data purchasing strategies and a prototype implementation.

Findings

Two data buying strategies compared in performance

FedMark prototype demonstrates economic viability

Marketplace facilitates monetization of commercial data

Abstract

The Web of Data (WoD) has experienced a phenomenal growth in the past. This growth is mainly fueled by tireless volunteers, government subsidies, and open data legislations. The majority of commercial data has not made the transition to the WoD, yet. The problem is that it is not clear how publishers of commercial data can monetize their data in this new setting. Advertisement, which is one of the main financial engines of the World Wide Web, cannot be applied to the Web of Data as such unwanted data can easily be filtered out, automatically. This raises the question how the WoD can (i) maintain its grow when subsidies disappear and (ii) give commercial data providers financial incentives to share their wealth of data. In this paper, we propose a marketplace for the WoD as a solution for this data monetization problem. Our approach allows a customer to transparently buy data from a combination of different providers. To that end, we introduce two different approaches for deciding which data elements to buy and compare their performance. We also introduce FedMark, a prototypical implementation of our marketplace that represents a first step towards an economically viable WoD beyond subsidies.