FU Berlin, Fachbereich Mathematik und Informatik, Institut für Informatik

Vortrag des Informatik-Kolloquiums

There is no doubt that the Internet is at the moment the fastest growing information system. So far, however, it has mostly been used for distributing textual information but rarely data and computational resources. With the steadily increasing number of potential customers, it becomes interesting for information providers to make their data and computational services accessible through the Internet. In contrast to the majority of currently available Internet applications, it is to be expected that these services are not freely accessible but are rented by customers whenever needed. Thus creating an Internet Marketplace with providers offering services and customers `buying' them. In this talk we first introduce the concept of an Internet Marketplace and explain how it differs to other existing distributed technologies. We then present a model of a Spatial Internet Marketplace which was developed in the context of the project SMART currently conducted at CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences, Australia. Next we discuss in more detail the issue of automatic planning in the SMART setting and identify key differences between planning in an Internet Marketplace and federated database systems. Since the feasibility of planning in a Spatial Internet Marketplace highly depends on its design, we compare various architectures with respect to their support for planning. The talk concludes with a discussion of future issues.