Patent ID: 7873595

Claim:
A method, performed by a computer system, for determining whether a target company and a second company are related, the method comprising: locating a co-occurrence of a target company name of the target company and a second company name of the second company in a first set of data sources; identifying a business relationship between the target company and the second company based upon a relationship indicator appearing with the co-occurrence of the target company name and the second company name; verifying the business relationship using a second set of data sources based upon the target company and the second company having in common at least two of the following features: an industry type, a geographic location, a type of product provided, and a type of service provided; determining at least one of a plurality of hierarchical business categories to which the target company and the second company belong; determining a relationship strength value based on the relationship indicator, the second set of data sources and the determined hierarchical business category, the relationship strength value increasing or decreasing based on a depth of the determined business category in hierarchy; and identifying the second company as related to the target company when the relationship strength value is over a threshold.