CORI’s Contracts Database: More Documents, Faster

21 March 2007 at 5:18 pm Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Researchers in organizational economics and strategy who rely on CORI’s online contracts database — and c’mon, who doesn’t? — will be happy to know that the collection is growing faster than ever before:

SEATTLE — (BUSINESS WIRE) — QL2 Software today announced that the Contracting and Organizations Research Institute (CORI), one of the world’s leading research organizations on contracts, has deployed QL2’s flagship product, WebQL. CORI will leverage the on-demand power of WebQL to automate the Web data extraction process from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) database, EDGAR, to enhance the Institute’s knowledge base of contract information (K-Base). As a result of the implementation, CORI has been able reduce the document upload process to CORI’s K-Base from 15 hours to two hours; a productivity increase of 750% per day.

Based at the University of Missouri-Columbia, CORI’s goal is to build upon its collection of more than 250,000 contracts and other documents of interest to support studies conducted by academic researchers and professional clients focused on best practices as well as economic enterprise structure. Prior to QL2, document search and collection was being performed manually by students at the University, a process of copying and pasting new filings which often took more than 15 hours per EDGAR-filing day. Students also served as taxonomists, responsible for assigning each document to a particular category or associating it with certain search terms.

“WebQL allowed us to replace a slow, tedious and costly process with an automated solution that dramatically improves the speed, quality and consistency of the data extracted from EDGAR,” said Dr. Michael Sykuta, Associate Professor of Agribusiness and Director of CORI. “The solution has also helped reduce the drain on our network bandwidth, processing capacity and archival storage, and allowed the students to focus on processing and categorizing the documents downloaded by the WebQL-enhanced system. With nearly 50,000 documents waiting to be reviewed, we are certainly ahead in our data extraction and downloading.”

We hope users will enjoy the increasing breadth of the collection (and appreciate our contribution to the Marxist process of labor displacement). And if you haven’t seen CORI’s new search interface, you’re in for a treat.