In the modern information society, information becomes a commodity, to be subjected to the laws of the market place. Cost, price and customer value, ease of access, delivery times, information quality became factors that will dominate the information marketp lace in much the same way as they dominate the traditional market place.
Even the traditional market places undergo changes. Mere delivery of a product is considered just a small part of what customers demand. Rather it is the whole range of accompanying services that determine the value of the product. Some of these services have a tradition, like those of intermediaries such as whole salers, brokers, financial institutions, insurers. As trade is more and more conducted in the form of electronic business (EB) many of the traditional intermediaries become superfluous and are replaced by electronic agents. The orderly sequence of services between customer request and delivery is often referred to as “supply chain management (SCM)”.
Now, if the products are themselves information, i.e., non-material goods that can easily be exchanged electronically, would one not come to expect that SCM takes place almost entirely by electronic means? And what would that chain have to look like?
Exchange of non-material goods encounters fewer limits than that of physical artifacts. The consequences are well known: Flooding by information and non-trans-parency of the market. The objective of this paper is to identify and design novel intermediaries within the information SCM that serve two purposes: to make the market truly open by easing the integration of existing and new providers, and still to maintain market transparency for both, customers and providers.
The paper is organized as follows. In the next section we develop a reference scenario of a world of scientific literature and a university clientele of scientists and students, and derive the challenges for information provision in the university environment. Section 3 introduces a reference architecture. Section 4 presents an infrastructure consisting of two types of intermediaries, wrappers and traders, as the main supply-side components, and illustrates the interactions and the data exchange between these two components. Section 5 examines related work. Section 6 concludes the paper.
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Integration and Mediation of Information Sources in an Open Market Environment
