Abstract: A survey of how market-based approaches can affect space-mission planning, ranging from Information Markets to prioritize science goals at planning-time to Agoric Computing to trade computing resources during a mission. We also briefly introduce the challenges of Mechanism Design to outline the limits of market institutions, and its implications for new Architectural Styles that guide software development and integration based on these principles.

Abstract: Rather than using traditional text analysis to discover Web pages similar to a given page, we investigate applying link analysis. Since web pages exist in a link-rich environment, that has the potential to relate pages by any property imaginable -- since links are not restricted to intrinsic properties of the page text or metadata. In particular, while Web page similarity link analysis has been explored, prior work has deliberately ignored the explicitly hierarchical host & pathname structure within URLs. To exploit this property, we generalize Kleinberg's well-known "hubs and authorities" HITS algorithm; adapt this algorithm to accommodate hierarchical link structure; test some sample web queries; and argue that the results are potentially superior and that the algorithm itself is better motivated.

Abstract: This presentation recaps the status of the Zocalo project, presents a proposal that existing prediction markets would benefit from increasing their search engine visibility and providing price feeds, and shows how most of the existing prediction markets are missing an easy chance to offer more liquidity in their multi-outcome claims. The Zocalo Prediction Market toolkit is available as open source at SourceForge, and is being used in laboratory experiments at George Mason University. Those experiment are characterizing the effects of manipulators on Prediction Markets. We show a web-based replay of one session of those experiments. There are quite a few topics covered by the existing publicly visible prediction markets that are of widespread interest. The companies operating those markets could increase their visibility substantially by making their markets more searchable. If the descriptions of the claims were posted with stable web addresses, people insterested in the topics could refer to them more easily, and the search engines would be more likely to notice them when crawling the web, and more able to show them as results when they are relevant to a query. When prediction markets are based on claims with multiple exclusive outcomes, most of the current markets are not presenting traders with the best available prices. These markets maintain a separate double auction for each outcome, segmenting the available order volume into non-interacting submarkets. When outcomes are exclusive, bids on each outcome are bets against each of the others, and could add to the liquidity of all positions. Since most traders are price takers, this results in fewer trades taking place. Arbitrageurs are not a substitute for the market in offering these trading opportunities, since riskless arbitrage can't take advantage of interest that never appears in the order book.

Abstract: Clever application of existing XHTML elements and class attributes can make it easier to describe people, places, events, and other semistructured information in human-readable form.

Abstract: Microformats are a clever adaptation of semantic XHTML that makes it easier to publish, index, and extract semi-structured information such as tags, calendar entries, contact information, and reviews on the Web. This makes it a pragmatic path towards achieving the vision set forth for the Semantic Web. Even though it sidesteps the existing "technology stack" of RDF, ontologies, and Artificial Intelligence-inspired processing tools, various microformats have emerged that parallel the goals of several well-known Semantic Web projects. This position paper introduces the ideas behind microformats and gives examples; compares to similar efforts in the Semantic Web; and compares their prospects according to Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation model.