Ontotext’s Graph Database Helps Create EU-Wide Company Business Graph

In the face of exponentially growing data streams, business information providers invest a lot of time and resources to find and analyze company-related data from multiple sources. Determining the connections between all these companies, managers, owners and jurisdictions is a daunting task. And despite the huge volumes of available information, the general feeling is that there is still a lot to be done to improve transparency and accountability in both the private and the public sectors.

The European Business Graph

To address all these challenges, the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme funded euBusinessGraph (Enabling the European Business Graph for Innovative Data Products and Services). This is a cross-border cross-lingual project, which compiles, integrates and analyzes business data from various public and private sources.

The project started on January 1st, 2017 and ended on June 30th, 2019. Its main objective was to simplify data aggregation and integration across borders and languages. To achieve that, it relied on the capabilities of technologies such as Data-as-a-Service and Linked Data.

As the name of the project suggests, euBusinessGraph laid the foundations of a European Business Graph – a highly interconnected graph of information about companies across Europe from both public and private sector sources. The company data model and the ontology developed by Ontotext enables the integration of data from different data providers. The data model is open-source and is available on GitHub.

A Data Marketplace For Improved Efficiency and Competitiveness

Another major goal of the euBusinessGraph project was to create a data marketplace. The idea of the marketplace was to make data available in a common graph model and to enable the creation of data-driven products and services.

As one of the key technology providers in the euBusinessGraph project, Ontotext contributed to the creation, maintenance and provisioning of the data marketplace.

Currently, the data in the business graph and the data marketplace is kept in Ontotext’s signature semantic graph database – GraphDB. It enables users to link diverse data and enrich it via text analysis in order to build big knowledge graphs. Thanks to the capabilities of semantic technology, it is easy to unambiguously identify companies, persons, places and jurisdictions and to link them to additional relevant information.

Apart from serving as an entry point for discovering information about companies, the data marketplace aims to spur the creation of third-party applications and company-related data services. This will boost innovation across sectors and improve efficiency and competitiveness.

The immediate beneficiaries of a one-stop EU-wide company data are business information providers, the business publishing industry as well as marketing and sales sectors. But such a marketplace will also enhance the position of small innovative players and start-ups, which usually don’t have the resources for time-consuming business data research.

The End Result

The euBusinessGraph project has already received its final review from the European Commission. According to the review report, the partners have successfully completed the euBusinessGraph project and have delivered innovative software and services to the market. You can have a look at the public demonstrator of the euBusinessGraph marketplace.

Creating a European business graph and a business data marketplace is an important innovation and it will impact significantly the partners of the project and the European industry. The software technologies developed in the project are innovative and, in many cases, represent the international state of the art in the relevant technical areas, reads the H2020 euBusinessGraph Review Report.

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