Designing a market for quantitative knowledge

The awakening of government programs recognizing the information infrastructure of a country being a critical success factor for economic growth has not only stimulated the feasibility of electronic information sources but also has triggered the growth of electronic information pools. Unfortunately, the ever growing potential of electronic information such as the ubiquitous Internet is only poorly exploited. This is due to shortcomings in organizational aspects and in the semantical data modeling of existing information pools. To guarantee the current success of global and open information sources like Internet, we argue that economic issues as well as new approaches in data modeling must be considered in the near future. The paper presents architectural and implementation issues of a knowledge medium (KM) for quantitative information. Based on the vision of a KM introduced by M.J. Stefik (1988) we use market like coordination mechanisms (T.W. Malone and K. Crowston, 1991) to control generation, distribution and knowledge integration. First of all, the modeling of the quantitative information is discussed together with methods which allow to determine information semantics, origin, ownership and quality. Secondly, different organizational approaches within an information market are analyzed. These aspects concern different market coordination strategies, especially suitability thereof, the migration of local towards global information markets and the treatment of information as a negotiable good