Financial Demands of Swiss Municipalities
At a glance
- Project leader : Dr. Mark Cieliebak
- Project team : Dr. Fernando Benites de Azevedo e Souza, Martin Blöchlinger, Prof. Dr. Martin Braschler, Michael Wyss
- Project budget : CHF 45'500
- Project status : completed
- Funding partner : CTI
Description
In this project, the goal was to discover Swiss municipalities that might have a need for a credit. Project partner was a large financial service provider who gives credits to public institutions and organizations. To optimize their sales efforts, they wanted to develop a software system that automatically aggregates and evaluates publicly available data about all Swiss municipalities. Based on these data, the system should generate a ranked list of candidate municipalities that potentially have a need for a credit. During the project, we found a huge amount of valuable data sources: annual financial reports, changes in communal tax rates, tender for large construction projects, news reports about major tax payers etc. Part of the data was well-structured (e.g. Excel tables), but many documents were pure text – or even images of scanned documents. Hence, we used advanced technologies for text analytics to extract relevant information from these documents.