A Model and Framework for Matching Complementary Spatio-Temporal Needs

Currently, systems that let people search for opportunities to fulfill their spatio-temporal needs are built according to the conceptual model of service provider and consumer: After the providers make their needs publicly available, consumers use a specifically tailored query engine to find fitting offers. E.g., in carpooling, someone wants to fill an empty seat and to share costs (and publishes this offer), while another person wants to travel the same route. This model prevents the consuming side from making their needs available to the service providers and makes it hard to generalize, as query engines require rigid (often domain-specific) properties. Addressing this problem, we propose a generic model for publishing and processing complementary spatio-temporal needs. Our model uses a simulator to assess how well the collaboration between different entities would approximate their goals. To reuse existing concepts and embed the model into the emerging Semantic Web, everything is modeled in accordance with Linked Data principles.