Situation

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.

Solution

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.

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.