Patent attributes
A system for detecting a conflict of interest between entities includes a server and a database. The server selects a category to be evaluated for detecting whether or not two entities have a conflict of interest. A tree structure is created including the category and child and descendent categories of the category. The category and the child and descendent categories are hierarchically arranged as nodes of the tree structure. For the two entities, a conflict potential value is iteratively computed for each node based upon a previous conflict potential value of that node, previous conflict potential values of neighbouring nodes and distances between that node and neighbouring nodes. A conflict index value is computed for each node based upon the conflict potential value for that node for each entity. A conflict of interest between the entities is detected if the conflict index value of a node matches a predefined criteria.
