Designing a Market for Quantitative Knowledge
Georg Geyer, Christoph Kuhn, and Beat Schmid
Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 1997, pp. 89 – 108.
Abstract: The awakening of government programs during the past two years recognizing the information infrastructure of a country as a critical success factor for economic growth has not only stimulated the feasibility of electronic information sources but has also triggered the growth of electronic information pools. To guarantee the current success of global and open information sources like the Internet, we argue that economic issues must become an integral part of the emerging information infrastructure, along with new approaches in data modeling. This paper presents architectural and implementation issues of a market for quantitative knowledge based on the principles of a knowledge medium (KM) providing means for integrating semantically heterogeneous knowledge bases owned by independent organizations and integrating services of the information production process. The results are reflected in the design for a market that enables the trade of information goods with integrated facilities for information production and refinement. The market portrayed is predominately demand-driven; hence it provides information providers with immediate feedback on consumers’ requirements. This is enabled by representing semantics and quality as meta-information on the traded goods, fostering distributed production. Furthermore, the paper discusses approaches for the administration of copyright-related royalty fees.
Key Words and Phrases: copyrights in electronic markets, electronic markets, information markets, knowledge markets