[projectvrm] Intentcasting infrastructure?

[Florian Kleedorfer < >]

Dear VRM community,

I was recently nudged to look into VRM by Brent Shambough (hat tip). I 
read Doc Searls' book and browsed the wiki, and I found out that the 
project I've been working on over the last years is actually what this 
community may call a distributed intentcasting infrastructure. The 
project is called 'Web of needs'. Probably the best current link is 
this: http://researchstudio-sat.github.io/webofneeds/ - (no real demo 
yet, you must read the publications, sorry)

I've been searching the VRM wiki and related websites for a technical 
project that provides some kind of platform for the pRFP/intentcasting 
idea, but the closest thing I found was the (very impressive) KRL 
system, which by itself is not the kind of infrastructure I had 
suspected this community was building, and http://intently.co/, which 
pretty much seems to do what the Web of needs infrastructure provides, 
but is centralized. And I've seen the blog entries describing the Omie 
project.

To say in a nutshell what the system we're working on does: supply and 
demand are objects that live on the Web (like your twitter account lives 
on the Web), only that they can live on different servers or domains. 
Their content is described as linked data, which allows standardized 
data access and machine readability. Matching services crawl that data 
and find suitable matches between these objects. When a match is found, 
the matching service sends 'hint' messages to the objects involved, 
pointing at the appropriate counterpart. The object's owners can react 
by establishing a connection and then exchange messages. All sorts of 
fancy protocols can be stacked on top of that, eg. to have business 
transactions with a guaranteed outcome. The goal is to make the Web one 
marketplace where supply and demand have the same status.

My question, dear VRM community, is the following: Is there some 
development going on in the community that is similar to what we're 
doing?
Pointers, hints, explanations are welcome!

Note: I'm working on another paper on Web of needs. The information you 
provide may find its way into the related work section unless you forbid 
:)

Thanks for your time!
Best regards,

Florian