Competitive Intelligence and Decision Problems

Chapter 10

Contribution of Cognitive Sciences to Document Indexing in Scientific, Technical, and Economic Watch for Competitive Intelligence¹

10.1. Introduction

We have observed that the economic concerns of businesses, or even states, are placing increasing pressure on aspects of scientific research in a strategic positioning approach to markets. The registration of patents in domains of high technology research allows companies or nations to be actively involved in tomorrow’s technologies and their practical applications. Intellectual property has become a weapon for use in competitive intelligence.

It is now crucial that private or public organizations obtain tools and methods that allow them to “watch” the global environment in a given domain of research. Traditional keyword-based research does not provide sufficient exhaustivity or relevance, producing — paradoxically — “too much noise and too much silence”.

In this chapter, we will present a new indexing method, different from traditional keyword-based indexing strategies; our method takes inspiration from theories found in cognitive sciences [ELD 00] to create a precise watch profile of the person receiving information. This method aims to supply value-added information for decision assistance in real time.

This contribution introduces a new dimension to information extraction, as it considers concepts and contexts linked to a research or watch problem and the various subsequent associations, whatever the discipline(s) or ...