Market Blended Insight

The Market Blended Insight project is made up of leading players in the provision and use of business to business (B2B) marketing information and world class academic researchers in the area of Semantic Web technologies. The project has a clear objective of making a significant performance improvement in UK business to business (B2B) marketing activities in the 5-7 year timeframe. The UK economy for B2B marketing is 17.3bn (it's grown 47% in 5 years) with approaching 6bn contribution to UK exports. A 1% performance improvement in B2B activity is 173M improvement in UK productivity. The consortium believes the rapid expansion in available content, can be harnessed by recent advances in Semantic Web technologies when applied to both Media industry provision and company exploitation of business data and content. The project plans to aggregate this business information to provide an unparalleled archive of UK business activity and to develop rich semantic search and navigation tools to allow any business to 'place their sales proposition in front of a prospective buyer' confident the recipient has 'a propensity to buy'. The consortium will extend world class 'Semantic Web' research from the EPSRC's Advanced Knowledge Technologies IRC (AKT- http://www.aktors.org ) and apply it to large scale, real life UK company data sources to understand if we can discover within a very large information pool an organisation's 'propensity to buy'. The innovation will push boundaries in three areas: The anticipated scale of the information source we plan to create, based on the 3.7 million companies that incorporate the entire UK economy. The complexity of the ontology, covering a rich depth of information for each company. Finally and most difficult, the innovation required to identify within the information the semantic relations and queries required to determine 'propensity to buy' given a 'sales proposition'. The objective is to build an industrial scale prototype that will provide UK business users with dynamic, relevant insight into their target markets and allows them to make informed decisions on a potential client's propensity to buy. The consortuim contains a collection of leading UK companies, ParcelForce, British Gas, Norwich Union, Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank and 3M. They represent the variety of segments (Manufacturing, Banking, Insurance, Logistics and Utilities) within the UK economy. The industrial scale demonstrator will be be tested by the user group who will review it against the user specification and provide feedback. The consortium relationships have created a two way street for knowledge transfer between the Science base through industry to end user UK companies. Out, will flow exposure to the Semantic Web and back, will flow exposure to the realities of business needs. The consortium believes it has a unique interdisciplinary team that together provide the major requirements for success.