A Discussion on Pricing Relational Data

There exists a growing market for structured data on the Internet today, and this motivates a theoretical study of how relational data should be priced. We advocate for a framework where the seller defines a pricing scheme, by essentially stipulating the price of some queries, and the buyer is allowed to purchase data expressed by any query they wish: the system will derive the price automatically from the pricing scheme. We show that, in order to understand pricing, one needs to understand determinacy first. We also discuss some other open problems in pricing relational data.