¹School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
²School of Business Administration, Anhui University, Hefei, China
³School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

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Abstract—Web has been one of major sources to acquire competitor intelligence. In this paper, we first present a framework to acquire competitor intelligence from the Web, which consists of profile extraction, events extraction and business relations extraction. Then we 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. We 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. We also conduct an experiment to extract position relations from Web pages. The experimental results show that our approach is effective in the extraction of position relations.

Index Terms—Competitive intelligence; Web; Business relations.

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Cite: Jie Zhao, Peiquan Jin, Yanhong Liu, "Business Relations in the Web: Semantics and a Case Study," Journal of Software vol. 5, no. 8, pp. 826-833, 2010.