Smart Broker Objectives

Facilitate the purchase of remote sensing products

Smart Broker is a brokerage service to create an electronic marketplace in which data users and data vendors share information in order to gain mutual benefits. Smart Broker lowers spatial data costs for users and lowers risk for the data producers.

A new business model

With Smart Broker, vendors can get commitments before they incur the costs to acquire and process the data. This means the vendors can reduce their risks in making these products available. The user community can use the broker to create “projects” from interest in the production of a common data product. Vendors who register with Smart Broker can use the system to work with the data users to find common interests and transform client’s “expression of interest” into a binding purchase agreement through this electronic brokerage process. Data vendors can pass cost savings on to the CGDI communities by setting up “coordinated purchases” where data users share the purchase price among the users in the project.The key features of Smart Broker are:

 register, i.e., the broker is a neutral third party supporting an electronic marketplace to broker sales between data clients and data vendors.

 trigger creation of collaborative projects, i.e., clients can express interest in data and when those interests align sufficiently, a collaborative project is created to allow the purchase of data on behalf of that set clients. In this version of the Smart Broker, creation of the collaborative projects will be through the use of a GIS tool (i.e., ArcView)..

 view catalogue, i.e., allow registered users to view the current collaborative projects and the planned data acquisitions. The Catalogue accessible to the wider community to stimulate interest in joining projects.