Current methods of locating people who can provide us with useful information include reading their work, meetings at conferences, Internet searches, tracking down personal web pages, noticing contributions to mailing lists, recommendations from third-parties etc. There are also several reasons why unconstrained matchmaking may be an undesirable service - these are discussed later. It is one of the challenges of research in the field of DLs to investigate how to provide functionality that has not been possible before and yet which meets the needs of users. Such facilities may be based on real-world analogues, or involve quite different ways of working. There seem to be some interesting similarities between your approaches.
Most models have an intermediary, a matchmaker, that facilitates communication between the parties.
These are analogous to some of the traditional models of marriage arrangement. For example, personal lonelyhearts advertisements are part of the first stage whereas dating agencies encompass both of the first two stages, and traditional Orthodox Jewish matchmakers are involved in all three stages. In most cases this involves a candidate providing a description of themselves or their interests. Although this clearly has a cost for the user, supplying the information to an intermediary is much more efficient than repeatedly contacting numerous individuals. The same reasoning also applies to the 'extended presence' provided by software agents that autonomously search for information on a user's behalf.