=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-34/paper-3
|storemode=property
|title=The Times They Are A-Changin' The Corporate History Analyzer
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-34/angele_et_al.pdf
|volume=Vol-34
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/pakm/AngeleSSS00
}}
==The Times They Are A-Changin' The Corporate History Analyzer==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-34/angele_et_al.pdf
The Times They Are A-Changin' |
The Corporate History Analyzer
Jurgen Angeleb , Hans-Peter Schnurra,b , Ste en Staaba,b , Rudi Studera,b
E-Mail: fangele,schnurr,staab,studerg@ontoprise.de
a Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, 76128 Karlsruhe
http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS
b Ontoprise GmbH, Haid-und-Neu Strae 7, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany
http://www.ontoprise.com
Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
pieces are amalgamated in order to derive a
And accept it that soon plentitude of summarizing views onto current
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
and previous states of a airs.
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone 1 Introduction
For the times they are a-changin'.
Global markets changing with an ever faster pace are
Bob Dylan, 1963
one of the key topics in business nowadays. Keeping
track of what changes in the markets and recognizing
Abstract what moves one's competitors is vital to any enterprise
that wants to succeed on a global scale. While this has
Up-to-date corporate information research, been a truism for management at the topmost strate-
i.e. the active tracking and management of gic level for a long time, the very same necessity is
knowledge relevant to one's business, is a ma- currently springing up on all management levels down
jor task for knowledge-intensive companies. to the expert knowledge worker who manages his own
While the correct analysis of market situ- skills.
ations and competitors are critical require- The trouble is that these management levels and
ments for success, the failure to provide ade- professionals do have a hard time gathering informa-
quate knowledge about one's business environ- tion, analyzing it, and performing their operational
ment may incur large losses. In order to sup- work, such as researching and developing new products
port the tracking of external business knowl- or streamlining their production lines. This means
edge and its analysis, we have built CHAR, that the evaluation of what happens in one's own busi-
the Corporate History AnalyseR, a new type ness may often be neglected.
of system for gathering and analysing tem- Here comes corporate research into play. The task
poral data about companies. CHAR inte- of the corporate researchers is the tracking of rele-
grates facts about organizational structures vant knowledge in the outside business setting and the
and strategic activities into a common knowl- communication of important knowledge to stakehold-
edge base. Building on an ontology with ers within the company. The general diÆculty, then,
an elaborate temporal structure, knowledge is the delivery of knowledge to the right persons at the
right time and at the right level of abstraction. Peo-
The copyright of this paper belongs to the paper's authors. Per- ple do neither want to be ooded with facts that they
mission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted
do not need nor do they want to be swamped with
provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct
commercial advantage.
nitty gritty details, but they rather need a summariz-
Proc. of the Third Int. Conf. on Practical Aspects
ing view onto the single pieces of knowledge.
of Knowledge Management (PAKM2000) With these aims in mind, we have developed CHAR,
Basel, Switzerland, 30-31 Oct. 2000, (U. Reimer ed.) the Corporate History Analyzer, a system that allows
http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-34/ for collective gathering of information and for intelli-
J. Angele, H.-P. Schnurr, S. Staab, R. Studer 1-1
gent access to vast amounts of small pieces of knowl- competitor. Therefore, Bigcolor AG made a vertical
edge at the appropriate level of abstraction. Thus, integration and bought very interesting supply con-
CHAR constitutes an new type of system that is in- ditions via the acquistion of Grandcouleur S.A. Thus,
teresting from the application as well as from the tech- unfortunately, instead of higher sales volume you wont
nical point of view. Seen from the side of the users, have any sales in near future with Bigcolor AG. Bad
i.e. the corporate analysts and their customers, it sur- News!
passes existing systems regarding the range of support Now, it is easy to recognize, that your analysis of
it o ers on the querying and on the provisioning side. the situation was wrong. You had not enough infor-
Regarding the technical background, it incorporates a mation about the acquisition to create a better strat-
range of ontology-based knowledge management tools egy. Later on, you will hear a lot of colleagues telling
that are interesting in themselves and which are com- you stories about the well-known relationship between
bined to support a multitude of views based on an Grandcouleur S.A. and GrandBasic Inc. Even worse,
ontology with an elaborate temporal structure. but how should you handle such situations? There is
In the rest of this paper we will rst elaborate the an ever faster pace of change in global markets. There
business case that the history analyzer may be used for is no day without news about mergers, acquisitions
(cf. Section 2). Then we describe the views onto the and a lot of other strategic moves of players in every
knowledge base that support corporate researchers and industry. One of the most dynamic markets in the past
their co-workers and that allow the former (or possibly years has been the chemical industry. Here, big global
both groups) to contribute to the knowledge base. In players permanently restructure their organization, try
a nal step we describe how the overall system has to acquire small innovative technology leaders or ght
been conceived and implemented (Section 4). Before about entry strategies in new markets. This very dy-
we conclude, we give a short survey of related work namic situation leads to the problem, that no market
and refer to some business cases that are based on the participant has a permanent clear picture about the
same premises as our study, but which work on a basis industry.
much less sophisticated than CHAR. Nowadays, the market analysts, consultants and in-
house market research departments try to track the
2 A Case Study | Restructuring in activities of their industry with traditional methods.
the Chemical Industry Newspaper articles, online databases and annual com-
pany reports were analysed and competitors web pages
Consider the case you are key account manager of Col- were thoroughly tracked. The results are presented to
orBasic Inc, a supplier of basic material for the color the management, published in reports and distributed.
industry, responsible for several key accounts in the There exist several problems in this research process:
European color Industry. The other day you read in a
newspaper article, that one of your biggest customers, Information archives are document-based. For a
the German Bigcolor AG is in acquisition talks with collective gathering of facts this view is too coarse.
their french competitor Grandcouleur S.A. By this way one may introduce an abundance of
So what? In a rst happy reaction about this de- redundancies on the one hand and one may ac-
velopment, you discuss with your production manager count for only few of many aspects that occur in
the ability of your company to increase the production a particular document (e.g. only the information
of basic material in a short time period. You plan to given in the headlines), thus missing the crucial
convince your key account at Bigcolor AG to enhance pieces of information again.
your supply agreement also for their new subsidiary
The next problem stems from the fact that typi-
immediately after aquisition. Nice analysis! Your pro-
duction manager con rms a possible increase of pro- cally document management systems rely almost
duction and prepares a quick switch of production line. exclusively on information retrieval techniques,
Two month later, you read the news about the acquisi- which are rather unreliable.
tion of Grandcouleur S.A. and immediately, you meet Even if convential annotation is used for these
your key account at Bigcolor AG to get his agreement documents, it is most often too cumbersome to
for higher sales volume of basic material with very ex- describe the relevant implications, too. E.g., if
ible delivery conditions. Nice strategy! one company sells one of its units, the implica-
Your key account is impressed about your quick re- tion is that this unit may no longer be the sole
action and your fast and exible supply conditions, supplier for the overall company as it was before.
but tells you, that Bigcolor AG acquired Grandcouleur
S.A. due to the fact that they have a subsidiary in the These implications may only be made transparent
basic material industry, GrandBasic Inc., your biggest if background knowledge is used, but document
J. Angele, H.-P. Schnurr, S. Staab, R. Studer 1-2
management systems are typically restricted to their common work process and that is organized
thesauri | the most advanced ones employ topic around a semantic background.
maps.
In this section we elaborate on these two require-
Finally, di erent executives need di erent views ments in Subsections 3.1 and 3.2. Thereby, we
onto the same basic pieces of information. What only summarize the second part as it is composed
is relevant to the one employee, e.g., a competi- of parts that we have already described elsewhere
tor's expansion in his regional market, may be ([EMSS00, SS00, SAD 00]).
+
irrelevant from a more global point of view. The reader may note here that the mechanisms de-
scribed here rely on a common conceptualization of
Thus, what we wanted to have was a system that, the domain, an ontology. This and some further tech-
(i), supports the collective gathering of information nical assumptions will be explained in more detail in
on the level of facts rather than documents, (ii), inte- Section 4.
grates the gathering task smoothly into the common
research process, (iii), allows to intelligently combine 3.1 Querying Knowledge
facts or give a high-level view, e.g., a summarization
or a statement about a general trend, about a whole The query interface of the Corporate History Analyzer
set of facts, (iv), checks new facts against the available has been developed in order to deal with organiza-
background knowledge, (v), allows a multiple view ac- tional and strategic questions that depend on spatio-
cess to the knowledge via a single entry portal, and, temporal constraints. It renders views that may be
(vi), allows to route derived facts back into the com- seen on a common web browser. Actually, they look
mon workplace environment. just like common web sites with some choices for se-
Additionally, in our speci c business process, we lection. These selections are also controlled by the
want our system to improve the quality and speed of knowledge of the backend system, e.g. one can only
the knowledge gathering and distribution process in a select companies that are known to exist in the knowl-
companys research department. Therefore we have to edge repository.
assure an intuitive graphical user interface, tailored to Figure 1 depicts the main views that are o ered
the speci c user needs. by CHAR, viz. Activities, Organization, Know How,
Being given this system, the key account managers Strategic Questions and General Query Possibilities
of ColorBasic Inc. could have really pro ted from the (indicated by \Search"). While the latter may be
work done in his company's research department. He asked by means such as known from standard tools
would have seen the strategic implications following for OLAP/business intelligence, we consider to help
from the acquisition of Grandcouleur S.A. by Bigcolor the user with the corporate history analyzer through
AG. The system would have used the fact that Grand- views that directly re ect his interests on the organi-
Basic Inc. is a subsidiary of Grandcouleur S.A. and, zational and strategic level.
thus, a probable supplier for Bigcolor AG in order to
derive a vertical integration as a possible objective for 3.1.1 Answer organizational questions
the acquisition. Hence, the key account manager could The rst major category of queries relevant to the cor-
have done the right things. porate history is about organizational structures and
the activities that change organizational structures.
3 CHAR | The system For instance, the view of \acquisitions of M.A. Hanna"
returns all its purchases (cf. Fig. 2), and corresponding
In the previous section we have seen some pitfalls that
views are o ered for Sellings, Mergers, Restructurings
may appear while tracking one's markets and com-
and Management Changes (Figure 1).
petitors. From these problems we have derived the
requirements that a system for corporate history track- What is interesting to note at this point is that it is
ing should meet: rather diÆcult to get a clear picture of what is really
happening with M.A. Hanna. It is diÆcult and time-
1. It should provide multiple views onto the consuming for the human analyst to detect some trend
same knowledge base for di erent time frames, in lists of single facts. Observations become much eas-
for di erent regional foci, for varying intra- ier, when di erent types of facts may be related and
organisational structures and for di erent strate- contrasted. For instance, Figure 3 depicts two snap-
gic questions, to name but a few. shots of M.A. Hanna's organigram that are automat-
ically derived from single activities, like acquisitions
2. It should allow many people to contribute fac- and restructurings, and that give the analyst a neat
tual knowledge in a way that is embedded into picture of how formerly isolated purchases that M.A.
J. Angele, H.-P. Schnurr, S. Staab, R. Studer 1-3
Figure 1: The entry point to CHAR
J. Angele, H.-P. Schnurr, S. Staab, R. Studer 1-4
Hanna made before 1994 were more tightly integrated 3.1.3 Answer \arbitrary" questions
in the company in 1997 (e.g., \Compounding Technol-
ogy" having been reorganized into the Business Area Finally, the information seeker may also use our tree-
\Plastic Compounding"). based and hyperbolic interfaces (cf. [SAD 00]) to com-
+
It should have become clear that this type of com- pile \arbitrary" questions. These questions may com-
prehensive support is beyond the scope of straightfor- prise conceptual and relational restrictions according
ward database solutions, but rather requires extensive to the system's ontology and/or regular expressions.
programming or the type of mechanisms that we rely
on for CHAR | described in detail in Section 4. 3.2 Providing Knowledge
The process of providing new facts into the knowl-
3.1.2 Answer strategic questions edge warehouse should be as easy and as smoothly
This far, we have described how CHAR provides so- integrated into the common working tasks as possible.
phisticated support that is based on \hard facts" and For this reason we o er various modes of contributing
that does not aim at interpretation of single facts. knowledge.
With its support for strategic questions, CHAR tries First, one may enter information through a form-
to give answers to questions about business competi- based interface that is extended by a canonical and a
tors which cannot be answered de nitely, but which hyperbolic tree view onto the concept hierarchy (cf.
rely on some conjectures. For instance, the purchase [SAD 00]).
+
of a company from abroad may lead to a gain of mar- Second, when the information that is to be pro-
ket share in that area, and thus to a regional diversi- vided is produced during the writing of documenta-
cation. Thus, the rst question in in Figure 4 is a tions or reports one may use a template approach in
prototype strategic question. The overall list that we order to generate knowledge by writing these papers
currently support reads as: (cf. [SS00]).
Third, one may use wrapper mechanisms in order
1. Which Activity of X leads to operation in region to provide data from tables and lists on the web. For
Y? instance, the approach described in [BD99] uses the
2. Is there any regional expansion of X due to any same basic representation (viz. F-Logic, cf. next sec-
acquisition since T? tion) as its semantic backbone and may, thus, directly
feed into our knowledge base.
3. Is there any regional expansion of X due to the Fourth | and most important for CHAR, one may
acquisition of Y? use our annotation tool in order to add metadata to
4. What activity of X modi ed their Business Area data given in documents (cf. [EMSS00]). A snapshot
Y? of the annotation tool noting some action about M.A.
Hanna is shown in Figure 5: The user reads or works
5. What experience gains X from acquisition of Y? with documents using a text or spreadsheet process-
ing tool or an internet browser. When he detects some
Answers for some of these questions are presented relevant change being described in the document and
in the lower part of Figure 4. For example, Hanna's this change might become relevant , he highlights the
1
acquisition of Bergmann in 1994 led to a new opera- word or phrase and uses the annotation tool to select
tion in Western Europe | exploiting the background the type of the phrase (e.g. \Hanna M.A." is a com-
knowledge that Bergmann's German base lies in West- pany) and its relation to other material (e.g. Hanna
ern Europe (lower left of Figure 4). Question 2 trig- sells Shapes Distribution Business to GE Plastics on
gers a search for any kind of regional expansion within May 11, 2000). The document, these facts and meta-
some time frame, which may be answered positively data about the annotater, the time of annotation, etc.
with the case of EnviroCare Compounds (middle), Fi- is all stored in the back-end database. Currently this
nally, Hanna's business area of Plastic Compounding is a purely manual process. In the future we plan to
was a ected by restructurings such as the one of the use information retrieval methods to recognize phrases
company part that formerly was Bergmann. (or words) that had been seen and annotated before
By now it should be obvious that for this type of (e.g., if there is a second document about \Hanna
questions one needs comprehensive reasoning support, M.A.") and information extraction methods that pro-
such as rules about geographic relationships (Japan is
in Asia, Italy is in Southern Europe, etc.), rules about 1 Our rst intuition was that every major organizational
categorization of know how, as well as rules about change of one's competitors or clients should be noted by the
company's IT research department. Over time this rough esti-
strategic indications (purchase may be indicative for mation will have to be speci ed more precisely | also depending
regional expansion). on the type of change and its nancial implication.
J. Angele, H.-P. Schnurr, S. Staab, R. Studer 1-5
Figure 2: Acquisitions of M.A. Hanna
01.10.93
01.04.97
Figure 3: Before and after restructurings
J. Angele, H.-P. Schnurr, S. Staab, R. Studer 1-6
Figure 4: A view onto strategic questions
pose types and relations between objects for annota- ments elicitation phase. Results of this very rst
tion. Also right now, we are starting to test inter- phase constitute the input for the design of the
annotator agreement, but due to the complexity of the web site and for preliminary HTML pages and in-
task, we believe, the application will always require uence the formal domain model embodied in the
users who are trained with the system, the domain ontology.
and its underlying ontology.
In parallel to the development of the structure
4 Developing CHAR and layout of the web site an ontology engineering
process is started. An ontology de nes a common
Starting from the principle problem (Section 1), from language and schema used to structure, nd and
scenarios such as seen in Section 2, and from use cases exchange knowledge about the domain. For these
such as described in the previous section, the ques- purposes interesting concepts together with at-
tion was how to bring the required conceptual struc- tributes and relations between concepts are iden-
tures and reasoning capabilities into action. To an- ti ed and represented. Thereafter, rules are de-
swer this question, we here describe how we have ap- veloped. Rules describe more abstract dynamic
plied our general methodology for developing ontology- relations between objects which are used to derive
based systems to corporate history analysis (Subsec- new objects, attributes or relations that are not
tion 4.1) including the ontology engineering part (Sub- given explicitely. Developing the ontology con-
section 4.2) as well as the interface and integration taining static parts (concepts, attributes, roles)
issues (Subsection 4.3). and dynamic parts (rules) is the central issue in
developing such an application and is described
4.1 The Development Process for our case at hand in more detail in Section 4.2.
We distinguish di erent phases in the development
process that are illustrated in Figure 6. For the main In the query development step the views and
part this model is a sequential one. Nevertheless, at queries described in one of the earlier phases are
each stage there is an evaluation as to whether and as formalized. At rst, their functionality is tested
to how easily further development may proceed with independently from the web site design in evalu-
the design decisions that have been accomplished be- ating those formalized queries using the ontology
fore. The results feed back into the results of earlier and test facts.
stages of development. The main stages of the devel-
opment process and their key characteristics are given Finally, web pages are populated, i.e. the queries
in the following: and views developed during website design, and
formalized and tested during query formalization
User requirements are collected in the require- are integrated into query interface.
J. Angele, H.-P. Schnurr, S. Staab, R. Studer 1-7
Figure 5: The process of annotating documents
After this core development process information which represents the company executing the activity.
is provided to the knowledge base by the tools Acquisition has the properties price and share and
mentioned in Section 3.2, i.e. by annotating doc- the role hasObject, which represents the CompanyPart
uments, by directly providing facts using the fact the activity applies to.
editor etc. This process also runs in parallel to
the use of the system. Event [occursAt => Timepoint].
Activity::Event [subject => CompanyPart].
4.2 Ontology engineering Acquisition::Activity [
hasObject =>> CompanyPart;
The ontology for this application consists of (i) con- price =>> NUMBER;
cepts de ning and structuring important terms, (ii) share =>> NUMBER ].
their attributes specifying properties and relations,
and (iii) rules allowing inferences and the generation One of the key characteristics of this application was
of new knowledge. The language we use to represent that the user provides facts about new actions like ac-
this ontology is F-Logic [KLW95], which provides ad- quisitions and mergers to the system and the system
equate modeling primitives integrated into a logical derives the consequences. For this purpose rules had to
framework. We use our tool OntoEdit [SM00] to edit be modelled for all possible activities which incur such
this static part of the ontology graphically. consequences, for instance \If a company is renamed,
One speciality in this domain is that time issues it remains the same company but from this timepoint
have to be modeled. There are many objects which on this company has the new name", \If two companies
have a life time. For instance a company has a start are merged, a new company with a new name is cre-
time when it is founded and there is an end time when ated, the old companies disappear, they are from now
this company is acquired by another company or is on subsidiaries of the new company", \If a company is
merged with another company. So durations had to be acquired by another company with share 100% then the
modeled. Likewise, an Acquisition is an Event which rst one disappears at this time point and then belongs
occurs at a speci c time, which leads to the model- to the second one", or \If a division is outsourced it be-
ing of Timepoints. The following example shows the comes part of a new company or it becomes a company
modelling of Acquisitions as Activitys which itself on its own".
are events in F-Logic. The attribute occursAt repre- All these examples show that the modelling of time
sents the time point. Activity has the role subject is a central issue in this application. Modelling of time
J. Angele, H.-P. Schnurr, S. Staab, R. Studer 1-8
Figure 6: Developing ontology and web-based systems
has non-monotonic e ects. For instance when a com- FORALL N,C, ST,ET <-
pany is founded it potentially lives forever. But if it is C:company[name->>N] AND
later acquired by another company its life time ends. starts(C,ST) AND
ends(C,ET) AND
In addition to the modelling of the e ect of actions ST <= t < ET.
possible strategical consequences had to be modelled The user has to provide time t in a form eld. The
by rules. For example, \A company which has no expe- Javascript program has to read the time t out of the
rience in a certain technology and which acquires an- form eld, has to generate the query as a string, has
other company which has invented this technology may to add the url of the web page the answers are fed into
have the strategy to become technology leader in this and send it to the underlying knowledge-based system,
area" or \A company which has no base in a certain which in our case is the Ontobroker inference engine
region and which acquires another company which op- [DEFS99].
erates in this region may have the strategy to expand
into this region".
5 Related Work
In the business community various approaches are used
4.3 Glueing all parts together to analyze the development of markets and the be-
haviour of competitors. Portfolio analysis [Por92] is
During website design the presentation strategy and one of the most popular methods that are used. CHAR
actual layouts are developed. In the query formation is well-suited to support portfolio analysis since this
phase, queries are developed which deliver the infor- method depends on an up-to-date and comprehensive
mation. Instead of expressing those queries directly in collection of information about the behaviour of com-
F-Logic, it is more convenient to use our Query Builder petitors, a process that is considerably improved by
tool. In addition to the graphical de nition of queries CHAR. Furthermore, the rules that are available as
it provides output templates for the answers. These part of the background knowledge assist in deriving
templates may then be used as starting points for the (strategic) conclusions about the behaviour of these
development of the nal presentation of the answers to competitors.
the user. There are also templates for selection lists, Corporate research itself is also an important busi-
radio boxes or check lists, which may be used as initial ness area. A large collection of companies o er such
settings of HTML form elds. research services. Typically, the provided information
In the case that a user has to click to a xed query is stored in databases that can be accessed via di er-
without providing further information such a query ent indices. E.g. The Dialog Corporation o ers such
may be integrated directly into the web page as a hy- databases addressing among others mergers and ac-
pertext link by copy and paste from the Query Builder quisitions [DIA00]. However, these databases do not
tool into the HTML editor. provide any linking between the di erent M&A actions
In the other case that a user has to ll out a form nor do they derive additional information from these
which then generates a query, this query has to be facts. Reuters Business Brie ng [DJR00] is o ering
created out of the contents of the form elds by a a broad collection of services including also historical
Javascript program. E.g. the query that returns the information about companies. These services can be
names N of all companies C at time t (t is between integrated into an intranet environment thus provid-
start and end time of the company) may be expressed ing access to these services at the workplace of the
in F-Logic by: knowledge worker. Nevertheless, these services do not
J. Angele, H.-P. Schnurr, S. Staab, R. Studer 1-9
o er derived knowledge that is based on the explicitly from these di erent sources and integrating them in
speci ed facts. In the same way Hopenstedt [Hop00] the knowledge base, (iii) relating these pieces of in-
is o ering a large collection of company information formation to the available background knowledge, and
either in online databases or as CDs. Compared to (iv) deriving consequences that follow from these ac-
these commercial services the CHAR system is unique quired facts and the background knowledge - by apply-
with respect to its integration and interlinking of in- ing (non-monotonic) reasoning techniques. Based on
formation and the inference capabilities for deriving these techniques CHAR is o ering integrated results
new knowledge from the given facts. to various kind of queries including summarizations or
Considering the technical part, there exist, e.g., nu- trend analyses. These functions are built on top of
merous publications about handling temporal infor- the collection of methods and tools as o ered by the
mation. For instance, the Later system for manip- Ontobroker system [DEFS99] and the Semantic Com-
ulating and querying a temporal knowledge base is munity Web Portal framework [SAD 00]. +
described by Brusoni et al. [BCTP97]. Later o ers Future work will aim at providing better support
operations to assert and delete facts that specify qual- for extracting relevant pieces of information from vari-
itative and quantitative temporal relations. However, ous sources: a combination of linguistic and ontology-
temporal reasoning that includes the handling of non- based methods will provide semi-automatic means for
monotonicity is not supported by Later. information extraction. A rst step towards this direc-
In [BFG98] a general outline of an ontology-based tion is described in [EMSS00]. Another line of further
approach to knowlege management is given. There, research will be the integration of the CHAR system
three subtasks are described: ontological engineer- into the Smart Task Support approach [SS00] thus pro-
ing, characterizing the information sources in terms of viding assistance for researchers at their workplaces.
the ontology, and intelligent knowledge retrieval. The
CHAR system shows how this general approach may References
be instantiated to an intelligent KM solution and how [BCTP97] V. Brusoni, L. Console, P. Terenziani, and
these three subtasks are carried out by powerful tools. B. Pernici. Later: Managing temporal infor-
An intelligent search facility for documents is de- mation eÆciently. IEEE Expert, pages 56{63,
scribed in [SSHHS98]. They use the so-called Q- July/August 1997.
Technology for classifying documents and o ering [BD99] M. Bauer and D. Dengler. Trias: Trainable
intelligent retrieval mechanisms. However, the Q- information assistants for cooperative problem
calculus used in this approach is far less powerful than solving. In Proceedings of Agents-1999, pages
Frame-logic as used within the CHAR system. Fur- 260{267. ACM Press, 1999.
thermore, the CHAR system delivers knowledge pieces [BFG98] V. R. Benjamins, D. Fensel, and A. Gomez.
as answers to posed queries, whereas the system out- Knowledge management through ontologies.
lined in [SSHHS98] delivers documents as query re- In Reimer [Rei98].
sults.
[DEFS99] S. Decker, M. Erdmann, D. Fensel, and
R. Studer. Ontobroker: Ontology Based Ac-
6 Conclusion cess to Distributed and Semi-Structured In-
formation. In R. Meersman et al., editors,
Nowadays, markets are changing faster and faster. Database Semantics: Semantic Issues in Mul-
Therefore, the need to analyze the changes that oc- timedia Systems, pages 351{369. Kluwer Aca-
cur in a market increases dramatically. Conventional, demic Publisher, 1999.
document-based approaches do not meet the needs [DIA00] DIALOG.
anymore: di erent pieces of information have to be Smart tools for company intelligence from the
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