Data Marketplace Aggregator: a study towards designing Aggregator Business Models for data marketplaces

Abstract

The benefit of secondary use of data leads to the belief that data can be monetized through exchanging and trading between businesses. Many new data marketplaces emerge from this, resulting in the heterogeneity of the data marketplace that leads to market fragmentation in the industry. The aggregator business model can offer various values to users in a fragmented market. Therefore, the idea of designing aggregator business models for data marketplaces could be worthwhile investigating. Design Science Research (DSR) methodology is used in this research. Business model requirements to design aggregator business models were defined in the literature review. The business models of various aggregators are analyzed with case studies. From the requirements and case studies, four new aggregator business archetypes are derived: search engine, advanced search engine, comparison sites, and one-stop shop. These four aggregator business models are distinguished by their service offerings and their degree of the network. It is also discovered from case studies that there is a connection between the degree of network and aggregators' embedded technology. The high degree of network aggregators tend to use API, while the low degree of network aggregators tend to use information crawlers. The aggregator business model archetypes are then demonstrated to the data marketplace cases by translating the business models into business activities and services that can be offered to the users. Then, we evaluate the data marketplace aggregator business model through semi-structured interviews with experts. From the evaluation, it is discovered that data marketplace aggregators could offer value to the users, e.g., navigating users to find data sales and providing a single access point to collect data. Different technology aspects that could help to realize the aggregation services have also been developed by various projects. Additionally, data providers are willing to join the aggregation services due to the economic benefit. However, although the benefit and possibilities, multiple challenges need to be addressed by the data marketplace aggregator. There are issues with technical standardizations and interoperability that could be problematic in integrating various platforms for aggregation. Maintaining collaboration is difficult due to the need to provide data assurance, which could be expensive and exhausting. Additionally, although it is beneficial to navigate users in finding sales, data marketplace aggregators might offer little value to data buyers with market knowledge because they will directly buy the data from the sellers.