InfoClew FDI miner: Searching for companies in the 'deep' web

Despite recent efforts from giant corporations like Google to introduce clever ways to retrieve meaningful information from the Web, the results can only be described as single dimensional. This means that it is good at pointing searchers in the direction of where relevant information exists, but not providing a multi-dimensional view of a piece of information that puts it into context with other related data so that meaningful conclusions can be drawn. The reality is that searchers conducted by businesses continue to face dilemma and opportunity cost, because data is unstructured and often hidden in the deep Web. The proposed solution is designed to fill this yawning gap in the market and it will enable the limitations of existing search engines to be overcome, by locating, retrieving and visualising meaningful, contextualised semantic information about businesses and present that concisely and coherently as the company's 'profile'.

There are numerous potential applications for the InfoClew web intelligence mining system. However, the core focus of this proposal is the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) market environment; since the techniques used currently to identify potential foreign investors can be best described as elementary and are therefore time consuming, very expensive, and most disappointing, inaccurate. We propose a system solution that will analyse, identify and target potential foreign investors, in a way that is automatic, visual and will offer accurate, in-time and cost-effective information. The system will search the Web to identify candidate companies of a certain profile. For example, the system could identify those companies that have a significant probability of expanding their operations into a foreign location. Although this might be a specialised application area, the possibilities of applying the techniques addressed in this proposal in other business sectors are very great.