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.