Ontotext has won 779 605 BGN (approx. 400 000 EUR) funding under the European Union’s European Regional Development Fund through Operational Programme „Innovations and Competitiveness 2014-2020” call “Intelligent Specialization” for a new project that will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies for linking and harmonizing company data from various sources.
The Intelligent Matching and Linking of Company Data project (CIMA) started in May 2018 and will run until May 2020. CIMA will use machine learning, semantic modeling and data integration as well as logical inference and validation to make company and related data (persons, locations, industry taxonomies, technology fields) better harmonized, integrated, interlinked and easier to use.
Company and company-related economic information are crucial to many business operations. It empowers customer relationship management, acquisition of new clients, marketing campaigns, supply chain management, market analysis, competitive intelligence, mergers and acquisitions, etc. At present, there are approximately 300 million legal entities in the world. While company datasets can be acquired from multiple sources, no single one of them provides sufficient coverage and depth of information needed for comprehensive market or business intelligence.
To build such, one has to integrate data scattered across various datasets with various data structures and access methods. Currently, company data can be found in the official company registers of hundreds of jurisdictions, in open sources (such as DBpedia, Wikidata, Panama Papers), in semi-commercial sources (such as OpenCorporates), in commercial sources (such as Dun & Bradstreet, Bureau van Dijk, Factset, S&P Capital IQ), in investment-oriented databases (such as Crunchbase and CBI), etc. Often, the necessary information is only available in news and other textual sources, for example, about company directors or financial results.
In CIMA, Ontotext will build on top of its extensive expertise in cognitive analysis of databases and information. Years of experience in this area have led to the development of the Ontotext Platform. The platform facilitates the integration of structured information and text into huge Knowledge Graphs that include information about billions of concepts and the relationships between them.
The goal of the CIMA project is to harmonize data through semantic representation and integration, and to develop methods for semantic matching, linking and entity extraction for the chosen domain. It also includes preliminary research for the creation of an environment for data hosting and consumption.
CIMA will strengthen Ontotext’s business line on global market intelligence products, services and solutions, which have the highest growth potential. Ontotext already has delivered such solutions for some of the world’s biggest and most reputable business information agencies, rating agencies and M&A consultants. These solutions combine open data and data from most of the global vendors of company data.
The aim of the CIMA project is to invest in R&D that will make delivery of such solutions much more efficient in the future. The project will assist the process of adding new functionalities to Ontotext’s Ontotext Platform. This will boost the company’s competitiveness and will expand the market for these products.
The contract awarding ceremony for the CIMA project will take place at Grand Hotel Sofia on June 14, 2018. It will also include Q&A sessions about the project’s technical and financial operations and project reporting.
To see how our technologies help integrate and analyze company data, sign up to view a recording of our recent webinar Graph Analytics on Company Data and News led by Ontotext founder and CEO Atanas Kiryakov and check out the Q&As from it.
For more information, contact Doug Kimball, Chief Marketing Officer at Ontotext