Intelligent decision support for data purchase

Abstract

The Big Data era is affording a paradigm change on decision-making approaches. More and more, companies as well as individuals are relying on data rather than on the so called "gut feeling" to make decisions. However, searching the Web for carrying out purchases is not completely satisfactory yet, given the arduousness of finding suitable quality data. This has contributed to the emergence of data marketplaces as an alternative to traditional data commerce, as they provide appropriate online environments for data offering and purchasing. Nevertheless, as the number of available datasets to purchase increases, the task of buying appropriate offers is, very often, challenging. In this sense, we propose an intelligent decision support system to help buyers in purchasing data offers based on a multiple-criteria decision analysis. Experimental results show that our approach provides an interactive way that addresses buyers' needs, allowing them to state and easily refine their preferences, without any specific order, via a series of dataset recommendations.