A Text Mining based content gathering system as strategic support for SMEs

Abstract

The diffusion of innovation culture is an essential condition to guarantee entrepreneurial progress and improvement to the social fabric. Innovation processes in enterprises need constant Research and Development. The majority of Italian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) experience difficulties in keeping in touch with innovations in the research world, which hinders competitiveness growth in actual global markets. FirenzeTecnologia together with Synthema-TEMIS-Focuseek has developed an integrated platform named SPI-RIT ("Services for Enterprises - Research and Technological Innovation"), which is directly oriented to facilitate structured and life-long relationships between the regional industrial world and scientific one. SPI-RIT collects heterogeneous and distributed data, integrating focused crawling, multilingual natural language processing indexing and searching, unsupervised clustering. SPI-RIT advocates and encourages integration between research and industry; promotes the industrial use of research results; increases the technological development of enterprises to support their competitiveness, relying upon a network of contacts with institutions, research institutes and consulting organisations.