ECIS RefsBase
A .Net application with a SQL Server backend, RefsBase contains information on the
ethical behaviour of over 30,000 companies.
It is front-ended by the Corporate Critic
and Ethiscore web sites, and founded on our
ground-breaking dataspace technology.
Refsbase is a unique project that enables researchers to model the structure of
companies and corporate ownership, to enter media monitoring and other information
and link to companies and products, to classify that information, and to automatically
calculate corporate ethical ratings. In the past this had been done in a much more
time-consuming manner, and the resulting data was presented to the end-user in the
form of a printed bi-monthly magazine.
Research Database
Idonix created a system for Ethical Consumer Information Systems that enables their
research team to input and maintain the currently more than 65,000 records on issues
of corporate responsibility. The system also allows modelling of the complex ownership
links that sometimes exist between corporate entities. All this data feeds into
a rule-base that enables scores to be calculated, taking into account categorisation
of the data and ownership links through the corporate hierarchy.
Web Sites
Two asp.net web sites were also created to make this information available to a
wider audience. SQL Server merge replication is used to synchronise data between the main system and the web database.
Corporate Critic is a decision making tool aimed at institutions, charities, campaign
groups and ethical investors, and allows users to view corporate records directly.
Ethiscore is aimed at consumers, and provides product reports to help them decide
which brands to buy.
Both sites allow the user the flexibility to define their own ethical priorities,
and so modify the "ethiscore" - the overall ethical rating of a product or company.
This requires on-the-fly recalculation of scores, but adds extra value to the service.
E-Commerce
Both sites handle user subscriptions using on-line credit card transaction processing. Web user accounts are managed by the integrated tools within Idonix dataspace.