Internet has been a major source to acquireenterprise competitive intelligence. But what types ofcompetitive intelligence are hidden in the Internet? Thispaper presents an answer to this question. In this article, aconceptual framework to represent the competitiveintelligence in the Internet is introduced. The basic idea is touse an entity-oriented method to capture the semantics ofthe competitive intelligence in the Internet. Traditionalapproaches regard the competitive intelligence in theInternet as a set of Web pages, which leads to a largeamount of manual processing work. Oppositely, werepresent them as a set of entities, and further design twotypes of entities, namely the entities about competitors andthose about competition environment. Moreover, thedetailed semantics of each entity are discussed. We developformal approaches to represent these types of competitiveintelligence. As a result, a conceptual model for thecompetitive intelligence in the Internet is proposed, whichgives an explicit description for the competitive intelligencein the Internet. Finally, a case study to demonstrate thefeasibility of our conceptual model is explained. The resultsshow that it is feasible to use the proposed conceptual modelto capture the semantics of the competitive intelligence inthe Internet.
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