It is imperative for any organization to monitor their competition in order to stay on top of its game. Thankfully, there is a plethora of open source information, both structured and unstructured, that can be easily obtained from the Web and other publically available sources. When the sources are narrowed down by the topic of interest, finding specific organizations, people, and products mentioned in these sources will enhance Business Intelligence results.

Let's say that we are an organization specializing in chemical products. Having a collection of trade literature, we would like to know what our competition is doing. This involves following competing organizations, their products, and people who are "influencers" in an industry. The goals of this project are as follows: