The article "Reactive Company Control in Company Knowledge Graphs" by Davide Magnanimi, Luigi Bellomarini, Stefano Ceri and Davide Martinenghi will receive the Best Paper Award at the ICDE 2023 congress in the Industry and Applications Track. ICDE (IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering) is the main IEEE congress for research in the field of data management. The article originates from the activity of Davide Magnanimi, an "executive" student of the Bank of Italy (Research Division on Advanced Technologies) enrolled in the interdepartmental DADS (Data Analytics and Decision Sciences) Ph.D. program.
The article analyzes the problem of company control, which amounts to understanding who exercises decision-making power in companies – a relevant issue for central banks and market regulators. Property relations can be represented as a graph, which in real cases can have hundreds of millions of nodes (companies and individuals) and billions of arcs (ownership shares); according to a simple but effective and widely accepted model, company control requires, directly or indirectly (i.e. through other controlled companies), more than 50% of the shares.
The article addresses the problem of efficiently managing changes in control relationships following the addition and removal of individuals, companies and ownership shares (nodes and arcs of the graph). The proposed solution is based on an incremental update of the control relations which selectively involves only the modified parts of the graph. This solution enables the timely recalculation of the control structure on a large scale and makes it easy to analyze potential scenarios on the spot ("what-if analysis").