Individual Contract Wrappers

Individual Contract Wrappers

When providing information to a service, the requester also provides terms for how that information can be used.  Service providers agree to honor those terms in exchange for access to the data, and compliance is enforced through contract law. Terms might include an expiration date, limits on whether the data can be re-sold, or whether it can be used in aggregate form. This model is the mirror image of the Sole Source.

Examples: Personal.com offers a service that provides end users with a place to store personal data. Service providers agree to abide by a set of agreements in order to use this data.

When to use:

Advantages: Provides an incentive for the requester to provide clear, correct, and up-to-date information. In exchange for accepting limits on how the data can be used, the service provider gains access to better quality and more complete data.

Disadvantages: Emerging technology with evolving standards, not widely supported yet.

Ability to scale: It has a high ability to scale but it is almost a reverse architecture of the Sole Source and some of the same challenge.