Ontology-Driven Framework for Stock Market Monitoring and Surveillance

Ontologies are used to define concepts shared within application domains, and thus they play a key role in all aspects of information management providing a common, agreed, and, significantly, usable representation of the domain knowledge. In the context of financial securities and trading, there is a lack of work developing an ontology for stock markets and episodes of fraud and manipulation. This chapter attempts to address this gap by proposing a systematic framework for the development and management of an ontology for stock markets. It demonstrates the proposed framework through the development of a comprehensive domain ontology for stock market monitoring and surveillance. To achieve this, the chapter presents the use of techniques to bring together and integrate domain knowledge from existing sources alongside new knowledge derived from the analysis of unstructured sources based on ‘stock market’ fraud cases reported by the Securities Exchange Commission. The proposed framework and domain ontology are evaluated through six case studies that validate and evaluate the work in different types of ‘stock market’ monitoring and surveillance applications.