A catallactic market for data mining services

We describe a Grid market for exchanging data mining services based on the catallactic market mechanism proposed by von Hayek. This market mechanism allows selection between multiple instances of services based on operations required in a data mining task (such as data migration, data pre-processing and subsequently data analysis). Catallaxy is a decentralized approach, based on a “free market” mechanism, and is particularly useful when the number of market participants is large or when conditions within the market often change. It is therefore particularly suitable in Grid and peer-2-peer systems. The approach assumes that the service provider and user are not co-located, and require multiple message exchanges to carry out a data mining task. A market of J48-based decision tree algorithm instances, each implemented as a Web service, is used to demonstrate our approach. We have validated the feasibility of building catallactic data mining grid applications, and implemented a proof-of-concept application (Cat-COVITE) mapped to a catallactic Grid middleware.