‘MIA’, sponsored by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs, aims to develop a prototype for an information marketplace in Germany that would also give smaller businesses access to cloud computing and web-mining applications. VICO has been working as a consortium partner on the project ‘MIA – Marketplace for Information and Analyses’ since 2010.
The MIA project is part of the trusted_cloud programme. Its aim is to develop a prototype for an information marketplace for Germany under the direction of the Database Systems and Information Management Group (DIMA) at the Technical University of Berlin. The German-language web, with more than six billion websites at present, has extraordinary potential for a vast amount of applications. However, the enormous quantity of data on the German-language web is both a gift and a curse for businesses. As a result, the majority of procedures never leave research labs. Despite promising and already-researched procedures to evaluate web data, there is still a lack of viable business models. A major obstacle is the high cost of collecting, providing and evaluating this database. To analyse large parts of the web, the necessary IT infrastructure has to be constructed, and the data acquired. In addition, there are high implementation costs, as well as costs for continuous updates and the analysis of the data. The related risks, especially with new business models, are generally not viable for medium-sized companies, and therefore represent an insurmountable barrier to innovation. For cost reasons, medium-sized companies in particular are not yet in a position to transfer the latest research results in the fields of cloud computing and web-mining into profitable applications by the use of ever shorter innovation cycles.