Association rules-based Ontology Enrichment

Among the most powerful tools for knowledge representation, we cite the ontology which allows knowledge structuring and sharing. In order to achieve efficient domain knowledge bases content, the latter has to establish well linked and knowledge between its components. In parallel, data mining techniques are used to discover hidden structures within large databases. In particular, association rules are used to discover co-occurrence relationships from past experiences. In this context, we propose, to develop a method to enrich existing ontologies with the identification of novel semantic relations between concepts in order to have a better coverage of the domain knowledge. The enrichment process is realized through discovered association rules. Nevertheless, this technique generates a large number of rules, where some of them, may be evident or already declared in the knowledge base. To this end, the generated association rules are categorized into three main classes: known knowledge, novel knowledge and unexpected rules. We demonstrate the applicability of this method using an existing mammographic ontology and patient’s records.