An infrastructure for meta-auctions

Auctions have been a popular trading paradigm for centuries but have gained new interest through world-wide trading on the Internet. Many B2C sites are embracing reverse auctions as an additional service to registered customers. In all these cases the efficient notification of the participants is essential. We develop the notion of a meta-auction that allows a potential buyer to roam automatically across auction sites and we identify critical communication and notification requirements of the next generation of Internet-scale trading systems. First, today's information systems are limited in their growth and interaction potential because the typical client-server and n-tier system architectures are solely based on a request/response interaction; second, the user-initiated query metaphor from the database domain is the primary means for information acquisition; and third, many assumptions about the meaning of data and notifications provided and exchanged through the Internet are left implicit. We argue that Internet-scale business applications require publish/subscribe as an additional interaction paradigm, should leverage proactive information dissemination and caching mechanisms, and that there is a compelling need for metadata-based infrastructures providing common vocabularies for semantically meaningful exchange of data and notifications. We illustrate these points through examples from the auction domain and the development of the meta-auction concept.