Towards personalised web intelligence

The Flexible Organizer for Competitive Intelligence (FOCI) is a personalised web intelligence system that provides an integrated platform for gathering, organising, tracking, and disseminating competitive information on the web. FOCI builds personalised information portfolios through a novel method called User-Configurable Clustering, which allows a user to personalise his/her portfolios in terms of the content as well as the organisational structure. This paper outlines the key challenges we face in personalised information management and gives a detailed account of FOCI's underlying personalisation mechanism. For a quantitative evaluation of the system's performance, we propose a set of performance indices based on information entropy that measures the degree of matching between a system-generated cluster structure and a user-preferred category organisation. Experimental results of a case study show that FOCI's personalisation increases the degree of matching tremendously after a reasonable number of operations. In addition, the personalised portfolios can be used to track and organise new information with a good level of performance.