Research on business information by public administrators

Any organisation, research institutes, universities and companies likewise need to be compliant with the increasing number of current laws and regulations. As non-compliance is a risk that may harm a business seriously, risk assessment procedures need to be performed in regard to compliance with future regulations as well. In this scenario, the compliance officer Mr. Clark has been assigned the task to identify potential risks how the economic and financial changes in law and regulations in the European market may affect the organisation’s compliance. For example, changes in the administrative procedures of research organisations and industries are required when participating in recent EU-funded programs. Organisations now need to apply the full-cost pricing model when reporting their costs. Another case where organisational changes in the administration are relevant is when the company plans to extend its business to other European countries. Here, the company needs to conduct so-called “country by country reporting”, which refers to a requirement of the EU to companies to split up financial reports by the different countries in which they have businesses.

Overall, many jurisdictions require research organisations and companies to constantly being updated and trained in risk assessment procedures to ensure compliance with laws and regulations. The MOVING platform will provide the user with the appropriate tools to achieve that efficiently and effectively. As part of his research, Mr. Clark is using the MOVING platform to conduct an analysis of the political, economic, social and technological factors that has to be performed. This “PEST-Analysis” is usually performed as part of a “SWOT-Analysis”, identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

The advantage of this new MOVING approach is to generate knowledge from the data at the desired level of detail, e.g. without a need to go into too much detail. However, at any stage, the user is able to access the content if needed. Further, measures are implemented, enabling the user to access the completeness of a research. For example, by using measures of centrality of a topic, the user may assess the most important aspects of a topic. The flexibility of the analysis together with different views and data analysis instruments enables to make decisions on a reasonable basis.

Managing and mining research information 

The reception of the activities and results of other scientists in a certain research field as well as a precise knowledge of the current state of the discussion within the relevant scientific community is one of the core tasks in scientific work process in means of research quality. On the one hand this practice makes sure that newer or even older ideas cannot be falsely stolen and solutions do not have to be worked out twice. On the other hand it is the base for the scientific principle that new scientific ideas should always build on the results of previous work to enhance scientific innovation. Serious scientific work is therefore not without good literature review.

Today, the Internet is the central place for scientific information and literature review. The available sources are varied: in addition to increasing library catalogs, online archives and databases as the classical approaches, social networking sites (e.g. ResearchGate) and content sharing platforms such as Slideshare or scientific blogs are available as sources. Since not only the content but also the number of possible sources increase rapidly, researchers are also increasingly faced with the problem of information overload: information is plentiful, but there is not enough time to systematically locate and evaluate the vast information resources. The discrepancy between the theoretically offered wealth of information and the practical possibilities of their exploitation within the everyday academic work is thereby perceived as more painful and successful research today is more than ever before demanding a comprehensive respectively international perspective.

Therefore, the automated analysis of large literature corpora in a specific field of research is of great interest for scientist of every discipline. Specifically, MOVING will examine the following fields:

• state-of the-art on a research topic,

• development of a (hitherto unknown) research field (e.g. in the context of qualification work or for the purpose of meta-research),

• analysis of provenance and the genesis of discourses,

• identification of research desiderata,

• finding suitable partners for research projects that are active in the respective research fields,

• actor analysis/network analysis (including for areas of scientific policy advice and strategy development) and

• strategic decisions in the field of science funding (ministries, university administrators and others).

Such automated analyses are only useful if the path to the analyses results are reconstructable for researchers. Especially in the humanities and the social sciences there is often a lack in understanding the principles and methods of data mining. The consequence of this is that on the one hand awareness of the possibilities is missing. On the other hand the competencies to make meaningful use of the results are not sufficient.