Identification of requirements for focused crawlers in technology intelligence

The fast and high availability of knowledge is at first seen as a benefit for knowledge workers in the information age. On closer examination the outcome of this is a big challenge: The amount of data that is available these days has to be reasonably structured and conditioned. Only the US Library of Congress collected 235 terabyte of data on its own by April 2011. Technology intelligence as a fundamental component of technology management is expected to monitor these data, so technology managers are able to respond to new developments and trends just in time. Possible tools to meet this challenge in an efficient way are the focused crawlers. These are programs, which explore data collections independently to identify material related to the current working context. To implement such a tool, there exist a multitude of different approaches within the field of information retrieval, but they have to be used and combined on an individual basis to fit the requirements of a particular task. Hence, before a focused crawler can make the processes of technology intelligence more efficient, the dedicated requirements have to be identified. In this paper we develop a requirements model to close this gap.