The rapid developments in the Internet are penetrating all aspects of private and commercial life. The amazing variety of information and services on offer can make the lives of the users significantly easier, save time and provide all sorts of comfort. At the same time users are encouraged to reveal more and more about themselves in the Internet.  

Web 2.0, also known as the social network, uses Forums, Blogs, MySpace and YouTube to provide methods by which users can voice their opinions and desires, indeed reveal their entire identities, publicly. This has led to an enormous flood of information being input into the web which is, however, still diffuse and unstructured. Search machines like Google are able to find individual items of targeted information, but are not yet able to systematically evaluate and aggregate a large range of data sources. Websites on which the customer can express their satisfaction with a product or service, such as a hotel for example, offer excellent analysis for this specific use, but can only be correlated with other information sources to a limited extent.   

Web 3.0, the semantic network, promises to provide structures for more systematic access to content. The key here is the ­semantic analysis of web content in order to be able to automatically recognize its relevance and prepare it for use. Web 3.0 provides interfaces to compile information from all sorts of web sources and then to link this to internal company data. In this way companies will gain access to better methods and tools for identifying their customers’ profiles and behavior patterns and thus be able to improve the positioning of their products and services. Business Intelligence faces the challenge of channeling the amazing mass of data in the World Wide Web to make it useful. 

What is Business Intelligence (BI)? The term has been in use for more than 20 years now and Detecon understands it to stand for a set of methods, technologies and processes which aim to support rapid and sustainable decision-making and the development of management tools within the company. BI is one of the company’s main performance management tools.