The Echobot Business Sector Catalogue
The Echobot Business Sector Catalogue is designed to complement the established standard classifications such as the ones from the WZ Code Catalogue of the German Federal Office of Statistics. These new and additional filter options both enhance and simplify your search options.
The rather high level of detail in the WZ Code classifications may not be necessary for all types of searches. In these use cases, you can instead use the Echobot business sector classifications, which allow for a simpler and more compact overview of the relevant sectors.
Our experts at Echobot analyzed the well-known WZ Code classifications and enriched these classifications with useful feedback from our clients as well as insights from actual use cases. Based on these insights and the feedback from our clients, we merged the classifications of certain business sectors, added more detailed classifications where necessary, and renamed certain sectors in order to allow for easier recognition and more intuitive usage.
We believe that all of these changes will allow for much more intuitive and convenient search filter setups.
Behind the scenes
The new classifications are created using our Company2vec machine learning technology.
We trained our AI to position companies within a multidimensional space. Through this process, the AI learned to place companies close to one another within this space if their corresponding description texts would match both companies. These description texts are being sourced from a variety of different sources such as official registers, descriptions on company websites, or social networks.
The AI also learned to only process relevant parts of the description texts (such as information about products, company size, or business sector) and ignore other aspects (such as generic phrasing). Companies with a similar profile are placed close to one another within this space, whereas companies with major contextual differences are further removed from one another. This allows for a good comparison of different companies.
The same procedure is being used for the Echobot business sector classifications. A reference list with companies where the business type is properly recorded allows for the classification of related companies and their prospective areas of activities and expertise.
When you start entering a business sector in the TARGET search, the tool will suggest matching or similar business types. Refer to the small print at the right side of the sector for further information:
The industry will then be displayed in the list as a main- and sub-category next to the respective company:
