An e-Knowledge application for local government and small and medium businesses

This paper presents an e-Knowledge application able to support decision makers in strategic planning for the growth of a territory. The application integrates a decision support system and provides e-Knowledge services for the analysis of territorial dynamics by processing and modelling huge amounts of data through mining techniques, in order to discover rules and patterns in a distributed and heterogeneous content environment. The application is build on a technologic infrastructure of Business Integration, based on Service Oriented Architecture, and a virtual private network for the cooperation between Local Government and Small and Medium Business applications. Techniques of crawling and Web Mining are respectively used for the extraction and the analysis of unstructured and semi-structured data. For the analysis of structured data, the application covers the whole Knowledge Discovery in Database processes. Finally, a case study of Employment Analysis is presented.