Execution Planning in Internet Marketplaces

Internet Marketplaces have recently been proposed as a new and interesting model to make data and computational services available to a broad public. Unlike electronic commerce where services are only requested over the Internet, Internet Marketplace services are both requested and delivered through the Internet. The key idea of Internet Marketplaces is that providers make a range of services available on the Internet and customers rent them whenever necessary. We argue in this paper that such a market model ooers a range of advantages over conventional marketplaces and that is attractive for both customers and providers. For Spatial Internet Marketplaces it has been proposed that there should be some support for automatic execution planning. Since execution planning in federated database systems is closely related to execution planning in Internet Marketplaces, we rst compare those paradigms. Our analysis shows that the former can be considered as special case of the latter. Next we identify an Internet Marketplace architecture that supports automatic planning, but ooers a good compromise with respect to the interests of the marketplace participants.