Using machine learning to structure the expertise of companies: Analysis of the yahoo! business data

Organizations have to collaborate in order to achieve business goals which require to use a variety of domainspecific knowledge. Selection of partners with an appropriate expertise is one of the crucial tasks in the creation of virtual organizations. Partner selection can be facilitated by structuring partners’ competencies in an ontology. An alternative to manual ontology construction is to group and describe similar companies according to their domain of expertise. This paper proposes an approach to automatically construct a structured representation of companies’ expertise applied on the Yahoo! business data.