A SIMPLE METHOD FOR MINING AND VISUALIZING COMPANY RELATIONS BASED ON WEB SOURCES

One of the important aspects of market and competitive intelligence is the observation and analysis of a partner, customer or competitor’s relations with other companies. Using Web-based sources such as press releases, corporate Web sites or news articles and text mining technologies such as Named Entity Recognition, it is possible to automatically extract company relations out of Web content and to build network graphs showing how companies interact. Visualization software that can be integrated in a Webbased application offers means to explore, search, and analyse these networks and their meaning for a company. In this paper we demonstrate how to build a powerful company relation mining application with very little effort by effectively connecting open source toolkits.