A market mechanism for participatory global query: A first step of enterprise resources self-allocation

Abstract

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 an artificial market model to provide a Two-Stage Collaboration solution, where the first stage establishes optimal participation of databases for a search task, and the second executes the task in a traditional database query manner. The proposed model employs a new agent-based, peer-to-peer publish and subscribe approach to self-allocating database resources in an information enterprise. This approach promises to lead eventually to allocating other classes of information resources, as well. New results include (1) an agent model using a Metadatabase and an Agent-Base to create and manage large number of custom agents, (2) a peer-to-peer negotiation method, and (3) an open common schema design. The paper also provides an implementation scheme for developing the artificial market. Laboratory tests show that such a mechanism is feasible for large scale matching and negotiation as required by the first stage. The second stage employs mainly previous results established in the field.