Terminology and Knowledge Engineering in Fraud Detection

Due to its huge volume of information and wide-spread access, the Internet
becomes an attractive medium for fraudsters to reach a large number of
potential victims in a short time. Moreover, its size and dynamics make it
difficult to put the web contents under close legal surveillance. Consequently,
most frauds on the Internet are discovered by accident and a large number of
them go undetected (Davia, 2000).
One of the aims of the FF POIROT project (IST-2001-38248), a European
research project in the fifth framework is to develop formal and shareable
knowledge repositories (i.e. ontologies) and terminological resources for
applications detecting and intercepting e.g. securities fraud on the Internet.
Securities fraud refers to the selling of overpriced or worthless shares, or
other financial instuments to the general public (Zhao et al., 2004c).
Within the framework of this research project, two approaches have been
worked out to support the development of ontological repositories, on the one
hand, and terminology bases, on the other hand. The integration of these
resources in fraud detection systems, motivates the application-oriented
views in both these methodologies: AKEM (for knowledge engineering) and
Termontography (for terminology engineering).
This article wants to show how the methods of AKEM and
Termontography are interacting in the development process towards an
innovative and technological solution for detecting and intercepting securities
fraud. The development tracks will be outlined in section 2. Next, we will
discuss the Termontography (section 3) and AKEM (section 4) approaches
and explain how both approaches interact within the scope of the problem
and knowledge space (section 5). In particular, we will show how principles
of the AKEM methodology are integrated in Termontography and, vice
versa, how Termontography contributes to the development of the formal and
shareable knowledge repository. Finally, in section 6 we conclude.