Typing and transformational effects in complex information supply

The amount of information available to us via the Web has increased enormously over the last few years. Even more, it seems that we are more and more dependent on this Web information in our day to day lives. Often we retrieve this information by querying the Web: data resources found on the web may provide the information that we are looking for. This implies that the Web may be seen as an information market: authors supply information and searchers may find it. In this article we present a formal reference model for the syntactic aspects of the information market. We explore the information landscape using a modeling approach. An important part of this model is a (syntactic) framework for transformations, which allows us to deal with the heterogeneity of the data resources found on the Web. Last but not least, we attempt to give an outline how our model may lead to a better understanding of how information is supplied via the Web. For this we use an example from the field of information retrieval.