The Internet is changing the world. As a tool for communication it opens new horizons for everybody, and especially for the business world. An overwhelming amount of information is available - product descriptions, price lists, share prices, auctions, advertisements, job offers, research papers, news articles and a lot more. Everybody in the company has to make decisions.
Objectives have to be defined and scenarios have to be planned and analysed.
And this process in turn is based on the available information . The Internet is a gigantic information store. Such a tool has to search efficiently for all relevant information on the Internet. It has to structure it and store it in a database. Some data has to be aggregated, indicators have to be calculated and time series have to be put together.