A Data-Driven Approach to Constructing an Ontological Concept Hierarchy Based on the Formal Concept Analysis

An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a domain. An important benefit of using an ontology during software development is that it enables the developer to reuse and share application domain knowledge using a common vocabulary across heterogeneous software platforms and programming languages. One of the most important components of ontologies is concept hierarchy, which models the information on the domain of interest in terms of concepts and subsumption relationships between them. However, it is extremely difficult and time-consuming for human experts to discover concepts and construct concept hierarchies from the domain.

In this paper we introduce Formal Concept Analysis(FCA) as the basis for a practical and well founded methodological approach to the construction of concept hierarchy. We present a semi-automatic tool,

FCAwizard

, to support the concept hierarchy construction. Based on the

FCAwizard

, we are now exploring a data-driven approach to construct medical ontologies from some medical data contained in clinical documents. We discuss the basic ideas of our work and its current state as well as the problems encountered and future directions.