A Broker for Selecting and Provisioning High

Modern business strategies are focused on customer satisfaction and especially on one-to-one marketing. Customer preferences and needs are inferred by analyzing information on their behaviour and attitudes. This information can be collected, stored, and analyzed by implementing data warehouse and CRM functionalities. However, companies also need market information about their competitors. A solution to obtain this information is to request data from syndicated data providers. The market of syndicated data is heterogeneous. Data providers own different data sets characterized by different quality and granularity. To obtain the required information, customers must buy multiple data sets from different providers and then clean and merge them. This paper proposes a broker architecture that works as an intermediary between users and syndicated data providers. On the basis of data quality and cost requirements, the broker builds the most suitable data set by integrating data from different providers. In the selection phase, the broker uses optimization and negotiation mechanisms in order to satisfy requirements.