Architecture of Integrated Market Platforms

Integrated Market Platforms (IMPs) represent a new class of service-oriented information and communication systems. Their primary goal is to facilitate the emergence of markets for cross-domain transactions. The concept is centered on an architecture capable of orchestrating transactions between the various parties, roles, and actors involved in the markets without relying on any of the classical mechanisms or solutions (interconnections, brokers, search engines, etc.). Most prominently, an IMP enables data cross-sourcing, whereby parties can advertise, offer, publish, or expose the data they are willing to share—or, at least, the data that their domain has made available for being accessed from other domains. Data cross-sourcing is enabled by complementarity criteria among the data being offered. Moreover, data-enabled transactions can work as complementary services in respect to traditional market transactions.