Business Stakeholder Analyzer: An Automatic Classification Approach to Facilitating Collaborative Commerce on the Web

As the Web is used increasingly to share and disseminate information, business analysts and managers are challenged to understand stakeholder relationships. Traditional stakeholder analysis approaches fail to accommodate the rapid Web growth while existing business intelligence tools lack analysis capability. This paper proposes an automatic classification approach to business stakeholder analysis on the Web. Based on the approach, we developed a system called Business Stakeholder Analyzer to perform automatic classification of stakeholder types. Experimental results showed that, compared with humans, the system achieved better within-class accuracies in widespread stakeholder types such as "partner/sponsor/supplier" and "media/reviewer." It was more efficient than human classification. The encouraging findings suggest a promising future of our approach to facilitating knowledge sharing in collaborative commerce.