Periodic Reporting for period 2 - euBusinessGraph (Enabling the European Business Graph for Innovative Data Products and Services)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2018-01-01 al 2019-06-30
euBusinessGraph was a timely project given that corporate data have a high potential. The project successfully completed and achieved all of its objectives and milestones. The project delivered innovative software and services to the market and strengthened the competitiveness and growth of the companies participating in the consortium. The project delivered six important business cases that have demonstrated already substantial impact and have high potential for growth.
Apart from the technical results, the project finalized the development of six data-driven business products and services based on company-related data value chains across domains that can be replicated throughout Europe. In particular, 1) the Corporate Events Data access, which integrates public corporate register data with the OpenCorporates.com database, 2) the Tender Discovery Service, which is a service for supporting companies in discovering new open tender opportunities tailored to their company profiles, 3) the Atoka+ B2B lead generation service, 4) the Customer Relationship Management Service (CRM-S), which leverages business data to establish new lines of business, 5) the Data Journalism Product Service, which supports journalists in dealing with complex and large volumes of company related data across the three journalistic workflows: search, monitoring and content production, and 6) the Norwegian Public Registries API service, which improves accessibility of several (currently disconnected) major Norwegian authoritative public sector registers.
The technical infrastructure realized in the euBusinessGraph platform is composed of: 1) data ingestion services (i.e. DataGraft, Grafterizer 2.0 ASIA and ABSTAT) to onboard data from different providers as a business graph according to the euBusinessGraph Company Data Model (vocabulary); 2) cross-cutting business analytics services (i.e. Wikifier, EventRegistry, Graph based analytics API, Relation tracker and TWEC) on top of the business graph; and 3) marketplace and data hosting services (i.e. the marketplace portal and GraphDB Cloud) to host and provide access to the business graph. The marketplace portal includes functionalities such as graphical user interface, faceted search, analytics, and company profiles.
euBusinessGraph defined an innovative vocabulary (i.e. the Company Data Model) for representing company-related data, covering key aspects of basic information about companies (e.g. company names, types, status, jurisdictions, addresses, classifications of economic activities, company registrations, company identifiers, company officers, etc.). Data from a selection of jurisdictions were onboarded and published according to the developed vocabulary to demonstrate the usefulness of the vocabulary as a mechanism to harmonize and integrate company-related data into a business graph across jurisdictions and across data providers.
The six data-driven products and services advanced the state of the art in their respective domains by developing innovative solutions for dealing with company-related data, with potential to impact on both the public and private sectors. The Corporate Events Data access (CED) service was refined through several iterations leading up to an official launch in June 2019, enabling its users access to information about corporate events. The Tender Discovery Service was finalized, enabling its users to discover new active open tender opportunities based on rich company profiles. The Atoka+ service was finalized, extending the coverage of the Atoka Lead Generation Platform beyond the Italian market, enabling users access to rich information about companies in several jurisdictions that weren’t available at the beginning of the project. The CRM-S solution was enriched with analytics platform infrastructure for continuously running and updating machine learning models, while at the same time improved the credit risk model for Norway. The Data Journalism Product - the Screener Tool – has been finalized, using the euBusinessGraph marketplace and data hosting APIs, allowing easier access to company data for data journalists. Finally, the BR-S service was released in production, and the information available in the service has been increased incrementally.
euBusinessGraph defined exploitation strategies for each business product/service as well as for each technical component developed as part of the project. Furthermore, the project was active during the second reporting period in disseminating the work in the project at various events, produced scientific publications, and contributed to supervision of students.