Web of Needs -- A New Paradigm for E-Commerce

Structurally, the Web resembles a marketplace: Web clients download documents from servers just like customers buy goods from kiosks. Interestingly, the marketplace metaphor for the Web goes further: most Web users are in the role of the customer and the documents downloaded in most cases actually represent commercial offers. This second resemblance leads to a fundamental asymmetry: in general, commercial offers are represented as first-class objects on the Web. Consumer needs, however, the very notions that drive the interaction, only materialize in the form of search terms or browsing behaviour. In this paper, we present an approach for explicitly representing needs as first-class objects on the Web of data in a way that allows interacting with them.