Identifying the business and social networks in the domain of production by merging the data from heterogeneous internet sources

Dominik Kozjek, Rok Vrabič, Gregor Eržen and Peter Butala

International Journal of Production Economics, 2018, vol. 200, issue C, 181-191

Abstract: People, companies, and institutions form networks as part of their technical, economic, and social activities. As a consequence, these networks have an influence on how companies conduct business. Recently, the Internet, professional, and scientific social networks have contributed to the ease and simplicity of the network forming process and the public availability of the corresponding data. We investigate whether useful information about the relationships between individuals, companies, and institutions for the domain of production can be extracted from publicly available, structured and unstructured data that is merged from various Internet sources. We demonstrate that relevant information about the structures of these networks can be obtained by merging publicly available data using a combination of advanced computational methods including web crawling, machine learning, and creating mash-ups of publicly available services. The feasibility and the applicability of the approach are shown for a case in the automotive domain. A potential use case of the resulting data is demonstrated, showing how the approach can be used to find specific skills and expertise for a scientific community consisting of people from industry and academia. The proposed approach can be used for the modelling and analysis of various forms of collaboration between and within businesses. As a tool, it could be used for the purposes of strategic networking, to facilitate the creation of project consortia, to identify competitors and other stakeholders in a certain domain, to pinpoint communication channels, to search for specific expertise, or to identify organisational and social structures within organisations.

Keywords: Production; Network; Network analysis; Data analytics; Skill profiling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925527318301518
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:proeco:v:200:y:2018:i:c:p:181-191

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2018.03.026

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Production Economics is currently edited by Stefan Minner

More articles in International Journal of Production Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().