Conceptual Clustering: Concept Formation, Drift and Novelty Detection

The paper presents a clustering method which can be applied to populated ontologies for discovering interesting groupings of resources therein. The method exploits a simple, yet effective and languageindependent, semi-distance measure for individuals, that is based on their underlying semantics along with a number of dimensions corresponding to a set of concept descriptions (discriminating features committee). The clustering algorithm is a partitional method and it based on the notion of medoids w.r.t. the adopted semi-distance measure. Eventually, it produces a hierarchical organization of groups of individuals. A final experiment demonstrates the validity of the approach using absolute quality indices. We propose two possible exploitations of these clusterings: concept formation and detecting concept drift or novelty.