Ontology-Based Business Plan Classification

The problem of providing Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) with good self-assessment tools is becoming more and more urgent every day, not only because of increasing market competition, but also because of new rules for credit granting, as for example the ones referred to as Basel II. One of the critical issues in designing supporting tools is the quality of the knowledge embedded in them. We maintain that a better quality of decisions can be obtained by exploiting not only quantitative information but also qualitative information and expert knowledge. Here we present a system able to classify the quality of innovation plans of SMEs by exploiting both quantitative and qualitative knowledge embedded in ontology. The ontological approach allows representing qualitative knowledge in a very natural way and, as a consequence, we are able to elicit it by means that are natural for SME officers, as for example questionnaires.