An e-marketplace infrastructure for information

As the varieties of multimedia data and information products begin to increase, it has become increasingly difficult for the end consumer to leverage the wide variety of available multimedia data and information products. In this paper, we propose an innovative infrastructure to enable the consumers to locate and tradeoff possible alternative multimedia and information products (such as earth science data and information sources) in an electronic marketplace setting. Specifically, this architecture provides mechanisms to annotate the requests and offerings of the data and information products, to decompose the concepts of the requests and offerings to facilitate the matchmaking and inferencing. Based on the knowledge models developed for each application domain and science discipline, the matchmaking mechanism will be able to fuse and combine multiple alternative data and information sources so that the quality of the results can be maximized while the cost for data acquisition is minimizing.