Business Relations in the Web: Semantics and a Case Study

Web has been one of major sources to acquire competitor intelligence. In this paper, the authors first present a framework to acquire competitor intelligence from the Web, which consists of profile extraction, events extraction and business relations extraction. Then they investigate the semantics of business relations in detail. A classification of business relations is presented, based on which a conceptual ontology for business relations is proposed. Finally, a case study of extracting business relations from Web pages is studied. They focus on the extraction of position relations from the Web. A structure-based approach is used to recognize the position relations hiding in Web pages. The basic idea as well as the detailed procedures is discussed in the paper.