This article is about the GEOeBIZ project which wants to improve business opportunities in geomarketing for small and medium enterprises. The project's central hypothesis is that spatial data infrastructures will move from data catalogues to federated platforms for the development of low cost and low risk applications. To complement the data-retrieval services of the Open GeoSpatial Consortium the project will design, implement and apply both, visual analysis services for geomarketing and e-business services for commercial exploitation. The article proposes a framework and services for visual analysis.

Marking text in a document is a convenient way of identifying bits of knowledge that are relevant for the reader, a colleague or a larger group. Based on such markings, networks of concepts with hyperlinks to their occurrences in a collection of documents can be developed. On the Internet, marked documents can easily be shared, concepts can be constructed collaboratively and the concept-document network can be used for navigation and direct access. Text marking, grounded concepts and the Internet as base technology are characteristics of our tool for managing so called “concept indexes”. We describe the current and the new design and outline some application scenarios: electronic help desks, information digests on the Web, teaching design in virtual classes and planning under quality control in distributed teams.

We describe how a system of communicating software agents can help people in finding useful information. The agents operate on the Web because it constitutes an almost universal source of information. Search engines on the Web provide information with high recall and tolerable precision, but they can only be as good as the queries asked. Agents can exploit and supplement search engines by providing information without being asked precise questions or without explicit questions at all. Agents can do that with little overhead for the users by exploiting bookmark collections as sources of self-descriptions on the Web, by recording queries, results, and assessments, and by sharing all this among anonymous users as well as groups of users known to each other.