ChainReact (Making Supplier Networks Transparent, Understandable and Responsive) is an effort to make supplier networks transparent, understandable, and responsive, so that companies and their stakeholders can see, react to, and ultimately transform corporate network impacts.  The main objectives of the project are:

• Identify irresponsible corporate activity
• Connect issues at corporate networks’ edges to network drivers
• Incentivize companies to address the issues

To this end, ChainReact will create an integrated data network supported by three platform struts:

1. A new informer platform (TalkFree) will help advocacy groups manage campaigns to solicit flexible bottom-up reports about corporate behaviour.
2. The world’s largest open repository of corporate information (OpenCorporates) will be enhanced to connect these reports to major corporate brands through multi-level corporate network mapping.
3. An open analysis platform (WikiRate.org) will integrate data from both sources (and others, including direct corporate disclosure) and support their interpretation via collaboratively-developed, dynamic, network-aware CSR metrics.

Role of MKLab:

MKLab is the project Coordinator of ChainReact. It is also involved in the entity matching that will support extracting corporate network data from unstructured documents. Entity matching by Explicit Semantic Analysis will make it possible to extract structured data from less structured data sources, including supplier network reporting, for which clear reporting standards have not yet emerged. In support of network data mapping, MKLab will also improve upon state-of-the-art entity mapping techniques to match and normalize corporate name references in unstructured textual space.