Query-based data pricing

Data is increasingly being bought and sold online, and Webbased marketplace services have emerged to facilitate these activities. However, current mechanisms for pricing data are very simple: buyers can choose only from a set of explicit views, each with a specific price. In this paper, we propose a framework for pricing data on the Internet that, given the price of a few views, allows the price of any query to be derived automatically. We call this capability “querybased pricing.” We first identify two important properties that the pricing function must satisfy, called arbitragefree and discount-free. Then, we prove that there exists a unique function that satisfies these properties and extends the seller’s explicit prices to all queries. When both the views and the query are Unions of Conjunctive Queries, the complexity of computing the price is high. To ensure tractability, we restrict the explicit prices to be defined only on selection views (which is the common practice...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: PODS
• Authors: Paraschos Koutris, Prasang Upadhyaya, Magdalena Balazinska, Bill Howe, Dan Suciu
• Keywords: Conjunctive Queries, Database, PODS 2012, Polynomial Time, Selection Queries