A Market Mechanism for Participatory Global Query: A First Step of Enterprise Resource Allocation

The problem of Database Query has always been considered from the user’s side. That is, the databases are always treated merely as the object of search, rather than being a subject or willing participants of an information exchange. This paradigm works when all participating databases belong to a single authority (such as a company) under which their participation is definitive and their contents completely open for the querying. Traditional single databases, federated databases, and even the new XML-based Internet databases subscribe to this user-oriented paradigm. However, emerging information enterprises are increasingly collaborative in nature, since they tend to involve, on a real-time and on-demand basis, a large number of databases belonging to many different organizations whose participation is conditional and case-by-case; e.g., drilling through supply chains. These collaborative queries deserve a new paradigm that equally account for the provider side. Research has shown that market-style self-allocation of users to providers is a promising approach to support such a paradigm. However, previous results of artificial markets are insufficient for global database query. Therefore, we develop a