Integrating Document Usage with Document Index in Competitive Intelligence Process

amount of information in term of documents, available to users as a result of information retrieval process for the purpose of resolution of decision problems is a major factor that determines whether economically viable decisions would be made or not. Various works in the literature had addressed the challenges of representing the documents with key terms (generated from the document) as well as the variations in the meaning of each key terms. In this work, a document representation scheme that is based on the key terms generated from the documents and their usage was developed. To realize this document representation scheme, a computational model for capturing document usage was designed with the use of attribute value pair technique of document annotation. The document usage model designed was applied in the development of a Competitive Intelligence based Document Usage Creation and Exploration system that is currently under development. A preliminary evaluation of the document usage model based on cosine similarity function between user query and documents set was carried out. The result obtained shows that representing documents in terms of their usage can enhance the quality of information search results as documents that would hitherto be considered not relevant to user query are found to be ranked very relevant based on previous usages.