Web Business Intelligence Research Articles

Exploiting the Information Web

The World Wide Web is an increasingly important data source for business decision making; however, extracting information from the Web remains one of the challenging issues related to Web business intelligence applications. To use heterogeneous Web data for decision making, documents containing relevant data must be located, and the data of interest within the documents must be identified and extracted. Currently, most automatic information extraction systems can only cope with a limited set of document formats or do not adapt well to changes in document structure, as a result, many real-world data sources with complex document structures cannot be consistently interpreted using a single information extraction system. This paper presents an adaptive information extraction system prototype that combines multiple information extraction approaches to allow more accurate and resilient data extraction for a wide variety of Web sources. The Amorphic Web information extraction system prototype can locate data of interest based on domain knowledge or page structure, can automatically generate a wrapper for a data source, and can detect when the structure of a Web-based resource has changed and act on this to search the updated resource to locate the desired data. The prototype Amorphic information extraction system demonstrated improved information extraction accuracy for the four different extraction scenarios examined when compared with traditional data extraction approaches

Business intelligence for new market development: a web semantic network analysis approach

Marketing via internet becomes more popular and common since the development of internet service is mature. Nowadays, most companies have their own websites to promote their company products and services aiming at developing their business. To recognise macromarketing trends and real-time customers' needs, contents in customer websites are valuable asset. However, different semantic patterns used in various parties may have great challenges in the comprehension of the content in the website. Moreover, organisational sales transaction system such as Management Information System (MIS) can help to determine sales performance of well-known customers. However, the customer information can only be part of the marketing information. As a result, this paper presents a Web Semantic Network Analysis (WSNA) approach for business intelligence. A prototype of an agent-based web Business Intelligence System (BIS) is established based on the WSNA approach. By adopting and integrating semantic network, agent technology, rule-based decision support system and scoring technique, the marketing and sales performance information can be captured, clustered, compared, analysed, integrated and disseminated. This leverages organisational marketing capital to support marketing plan and shorten the promotion planning time.

Links to commercial websites as a source of business information

Websites of China's top 100 information technology (IT) companies were examined. Link count to a company's website was found to correlate with the company's revenue, profit, and research and development expenses. This suggests that Web hyperlinks to commercial sites can be a business performance indicator and thus a source of business information. This information is useful for Web business intelligence and Web data mining. As a comparison to IT companies, China's top 100 privately owned companies were also studied. No relationship between link count and the business performance measure was found for these companies due probably to the heterogeneous nature of this group. Data collection issues for webometrics research were also explored in the study.

Web Business Intelligence: Mining the Web for Actionable Knowledge

It is estimated that over seven billion static pages exist in the Web today, and backend databases can potentially produce at least three times as many dynamic pages. However, the best search engines index only approximately 20% of the static pages. So the real question is: While the Web is certainly the most amazing and comprehensive information source ever created, are you really getting all the information you need for your specific purpose? The answer to this question is mostly “yes” for the individual user, who uses the Web as an information source for casual purposes. However, for an individual who uses the Web as an essential and comprehensive source of information—for business or research—the answer is quite the opposite. Even a sophisticated Web user requires a significant amount of time and effort to find all of the information needed for a given task. In this paper the concept of Web Business Intelligence (WBI) is introduced, an emerging class of software that leverages the unprecedented content on the Web to extract actionable knowledge in an organizational setting. The contributions include an architecture for WBI, a survey of technologies relevant to the various components of the architecture, and illustration of the value of WBI by means of a detailed example from the e-finance domain. This article concludes with a discussion on the future of WBI.