Raschid Part of Multi-Institutional Team Awarded $1M NSF Grant

Louiqa Raschid, a professor of information systems in the Robert H. Smith School of Business, is part of a multi-institutional team awarded $1 million by the National Science Foundation to help develop an open knowledge database for businesses.

The team, which includes researchers from the University of Southern California and Dartmouth College, will develop new computational methods for extracting, representing, linking, and analyzing data with complex and nuanced information about the business domain.

Raschid, who has an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, is a co-principal investigator on the project.

Currently, knowledge about markets and businesses is spread across a variety of sources, and is often unavailable for entrepreneurs, nonprofits, academia and small businesses. The research team will use the latest techniques in data science to create the Business Open Knowledge Network (BOKN), making data about businesses, innovation, and markets freely available in easily usable forms.

The goal of BOKN is to identify and incorporate critical data into a tool that will benefit small business growth, entrepreneurship, sustainable business and financial practices. For example, it will help entrepreneurs to fully understand the competitive landscape as they create small businesses, allow regulators to quickly identify issues to help prevent the next financial crisis, and enable researchers to develop and test theories to transform the nation's business practices.

The money for phase I of the project comes from NSF’s Convergence Accelerator pilot program, which supports team-based, multidisciplinary efforts to address challenges of national importance that show potential for deliverables in the near future.

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“Convergence Accelerator Phase I (RAISE): Leveraging Financial and Economic Data” is supported by NSF grant 1937153 from the Convergence Accelerator.

–Story by Maria Herd