Towards a Technology Platform for Building Corporate Radar Applications that Mine the Web for Business Insight

In this paper, we give a progress report on an ongoing effort at Accenture to develop a technology platform for building a wide range of corporate radar applications,which can turn the Web into a systematic source of business insight. Our goal is to share the platform we have developed and the lessons we have learned, so others can leverage this knowledge when building similar applications. We give an overview of this platform, which integrates a combination of established AI technologies - i.e. semantic models, natural language processing, and inference engines - in a novel way. We then illustrate the kinds of corporate radars that can be built with our platform through two applications we developed at Accenture: the technology lifecycle tracker, which assesses the maturity of technologies from the wireless industry, and the technology trend tracker, which measures hype versus reality for emerging technology trends such as cloud computing, software-as-a-service, and more. Finally, we discuss our experiences in using this platform to build these applications and the lessons learned.