Online Silk Road: Nurturing Social Search through Knowledge Bartering

Social search empowers seekers to help each other find the information they need by sharing their domain knowledge and search efforts. Current social search activities are primarily voluntary, acted on the goodwill to help others or the purpose for self-promotion and the contributed content is mostly retrievable free of charge to the public. However, the voluntary nature of social search compromises its long-term sustainability as participants are not offered intrinsic incentives to contribute and share information, and free information presents intricate ramifications on the its quality. In this paper, we present the idea of knowledge bartering, where one can barter a knowledge item they have for another item they wish to have. To make the idea viable, we propose the online silk road solution to automate a knowledge bartering process that can maximise the social welfare within a community.