The Case for the Web of Needs

E-marketplaces on the World Wide Web are information and transaction silos, which in the general case don't allow transactions across their boundaries. The consequence is that the Web, often termed the global marketplace, is fragmented along the dimensions of geography, content domain, supply or demand, user base, and many more. This fragmentation makes it inefficient to buy and sell commodities on the Web. We propose a framework that serves as a foundation for a distributed, de-centralized e-marketplace on top of the Web, making boundaries between existing systems disappear from the user's perspective. The framework standardizes the creation and description of objects that represent supply and demand. In addition to this, it allows for independent matching services to connect objects suitable for a transaction and it defines protocols for the message exchange between such objects.