Work in progress report: Chemdex and the business-to-business marketmaker business model

We present a brief work-in-progress report on Chemdex, a pioneering example of the business-to-business (B2B) marketmaker, infomediary, or vortex business model. We establish context of the marketmaker business model and contrast it with other approaches. We probe a marketmaker's unique challenges-which include ontology, information architecture, search, and integration-and benefits-which include cost savings, quality improvement, time-to-market, and market penetration. Understanding these challenges and benefits is important because there exists a growing sense that the marketmaker could become the dominant model in online commerce, especially in the business-to-business sector.