Conceptual Modeling for Competitive Intelligence Hiding in the Internet

Internet has been a major source to acquire enterprise competitive intelligence. But what types of competitive intelligence are hidden in the Internet? This paper presents an answer to this question. In this article, a conceptual framework to represent the competitive intelligence in the Internet is introduced. The basic idea is to use an entity-oriented method to capture the semantics of the competitive intelligence in the Internet. Traditional approaches regard the competitive intelligence in the Internet as a set of Web pages, which leads to a large amount of manual processing work. Oppositely, we represent them as a set of entities, and further design two types of entities, namely the entities about competitors and those about competition environment. Moreover, the detailed semantics of each entity are discussed. We develop formal approaches to represent these types of competitive intelligence. As a result, a conceptual model for the competitive intelligence in the Internet is proposed, which gives an explicit description for the competitive intelligence in the Internet. Finally, a case study to demonstrate the feasibility of our conceptual model is explained. The results show that it is feasible to use the proposed conceptual model to capture the semantics of the competitive intelligence in the Internet.