Beyond Data: Building a Web of Needs

The Web as related to commerce suffers from a fundamental asymmetry. While there is a great number of commercial offers available, consumer needs are rarely represented explicitly. Thus, the most widely applied process of connecting the prospective consumer of a resource with its supplier is Web search. In Web search, the user needs are implicit, driving the interaction, and therefore only the interaction partners can try to deduce them. We present an approach for a) publishing needs on the Web of Data and b) building a protocol that allows decentralized matching of needs and communication between need owners. Albeit inspired by the analysis of marketplaces, the proposed framework allows for a much broader range of social applications, such as collaborative problem solving, help organizing the sharing economy or finding interesting people to meet.