Professor Gottfried Vossen, of ERCIS, Universisty of Munster, Germany and University of Waikato Management School, New Zealand, will present the Department of Computer Science seminar, with a talk entitled, "Buying and Selling Data"

Trading data as a commodity has become increasingly popular in recent years, and data marketplaces have emerged as a new business model where data from a variety of sources can be collected, processed, enriched, bought, and sold. They are effectively changing the way data is distributed and managed on the Internet. To get a better understanding of the emergence of data marketplaces, we have  conducted several surveys in recent years in order to systematically gather and evaluate their characteristics; the first part of the talk reports essential findings from these studies. A central problem in any market is appropriate pricing. As for other goods, for data the challenge is to set a price that suits both the seller and the buyer. In the second part of the talk, data pricing is tied to data quality, and it is shown how  pricing can be reformulated as a multiple‐choice knapsack problem, which is essentially NP‐complete, yet allows for efficient approximations.

Gottfried Vossen is a Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Information Systems at the University of Muenster in Germany. He is a Fellow of the German Computer Science Society and an Honorary Professor at the University of Waikato Management School in Hamilton,  New Zealand. He received his master’s and Ph.D. degrees as well as the German Habilitation from the Technical University of Aachen in Germany, and is an Editor‐in‐Chief of Elsevier's Information Systems ‐ An International Journal. His current research interests include conceptual as well as application‐oriented challenges concerning databases, information systems, business process modeling, and Web 2.0 applications, cloud computing, and big data.