Decentralizing the Semantic Web: Who will pay to realize it?

Tobias Grubenmann, Daniele Dell'Aglio, Abraham Bernstein, Dmitry Moor, Sven Seuken

Submission Category: Vision Statement

Keywords: Financial Sustainability, Pricing Data, Market Models, Federated SPARQL, Decentralized Semantic Web

TL;DR: We propose a marketplace for decentralized data following basic WoD principles.

Abstract:

Fueled by enthusiasm of volunteers, government subsidies, and open data legislation, the Web of Data (WoD) has enjoyed a phenomenal growth. Commercial data, however, has been stuck in proprietary silos, as the monetization strategy for sharing data in the WoD is unclear. This is in contrast to the traditional web where advertisement fueled a lot of the growth.

This raises the question how the WoD can (i) maintain its success when government subsidies disappear and (ii) convince commercial entities to share their wealth of data.

In this paper, we propose a marketplace for decentralized data following basic WoD principles. Our approach allows a customer to buy data from different, decentralized providers in a transparent way. As such, our marketplace presents a first step towards an economically viable WoD beyond subsidies.