Web Mining Through The Online Analyst

Abstract

While the amount of data available to us through the Web and the intranets is increasing, our capacity of reading and analyzing this information remains constant. Search engines instead of reducing the problem augment it making more and more documents quickly available to us. Web mining is a new research area that tries to solve the information overload problem by exploiting recent advances in different fields of technology. Documents and web pages are a source of knowledge in an unstructured data format that can be decodified, analyzed and turned into actionable intelligence thanks to online analysis by text mining. In this paper an example of a real and operative application to competitive intelligence (CI) is given: the Online Analyst. The final objective of this application is to give to end users an intelligent agent to read and quickly analyze huge volumes of documents retrieved online, especially from the web. Its typical users are intelligence analysts, in military as in business or politics field. The most exciting conclusion is that the shown approach, as also the prototype, here shown in a CI application case, may be already easily used in all e-commerce applications (currently under development worldwide), that take into account the necessity of working with web and /or text data.