Reasoning about external environment from web sources

Abstract

Most organizations approach internal and external challenges with a varied degree of effectiveness. One of their biggest challenges is the ability to identify and respond appropriately to changes in their external environments. These changes affect not only their technological choices, but also their internal structures and cultures. In this context, we have seen an increasing demand for computational tools capable not only to support information storage but also to help in reasoning about the organizational environment. In particular, it is observed that the availability of a huge set of information in the Web offers a new opportunity to learn and reason about the organizational context. In this paper we present an empirical model to proceed the knowledge extraction from Web sources and support the reasoning process in the Competitive Intelligence domain. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.