Acquiring business ecosystem's intelligence through Large-Scale Collaborative Systems

The last years' economic turmoil constitutes a real challenge for the small, medium and large entities from all over the world, whose yearly turnovers and profits are seriously affected by the collapse of the aggregated demand and rise of business risks. In this context, the finding of a long-term business partner becomes more difficult, as market conditions change rapidly, and so does the financial stability of the business entities. In this article, we discuss how valuable information can be extracted from the Business Invisible Web (BIW), the part of the collaborative Web (Web 2.0) used by business entities in order to make transactions and report them, by use of Large-Scale Collaborative Systems. The research literature has shown that valuable knowledge can be derived for predicting the dependencies between various business sectors from the economy. Such knowledge can be extracted from the Web and used in a variety of Business Intelligence tasks, such as choosing a new Merger or Acquisition partner (strategic decisions) or simply choosing between a variety of available suppliers (operational decisions).