Résumé
Economic Intelligence (EI) is a concept that is the subject of multiple definitions. Undoubtedly, these are due to the confusion on the word "intelligence" (i.e. the "intelligence and espionage" in English, but "knowledge and expertise (or know-how)" in Latin meaning like in French), [1]: "Sometimes equated with economic espionage, sometimes traditional methods of strategy information processing for the benefit of the few companies, (...)". However, most experts in France and Europe seem to agree on the definition of B. Carayon (2003). For this author, doing Economic Intelligence, is trying to master, i.e. seek and protect the critical information necessary to perform an economic activity in a business firm [1]. The key verbs of the Economic Intelligence are: inform, anticipate and defend interests. One of the challenges of EI, as completed in "The Economic Intelligence: guide for beginners and practitioners - Programme of the European Commission", is "to transform the mass of data available in different forms, from many sources, which is often unorganised, and collected through several channels, into information, and then into knowledge and then into intelligence" [2]. The coordination actions are commonly admitted by EI practitioners as: "search", "processing" and "distribution" for "exploitation". Starting from both experience and theoretical researches in EI, Information systems (IS) and knowledge management (KM) domains [2][3] are joint with the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP). In methodology approach NooJ is used to add semantic methods to the EI system allowing a gain of performance in information retrieval, in decision-problem elicitation towards information monitoring. The first part of our paper consists to provide briefly the definitional framework of what is EI and to present the interest using NooJ Plateform to implement semantic methods towards our new EI system approach. The second part presents the case study for information monitoring methodology. Hence, we applied our theoretical schema to the project: specifically dedicated to nanometrology cluster gathering both academic labs and industries. Processing with NooJ is (i) to mine on actors linked to information needs in order to get the better management of the project and (ii) to determine the professional classes of each actor in the cluster.