Building an Ontology for Financial Investment

Intelligent agent technologies hold great promise for the financial services and investment industries such as portfolio management. In financial investment, a multi-agent system approach is natural because of the multiplicity of information sources and the different expertise that must be brought to bear to produce a good recommendation (such as a stock buy or sell decision). The agents in a multi-agent system need to coordinate, cooperate or communicate with each other to solve a complex problem. However, ontologies are a key component in how different agents in a multi-agent system can communicate effectively, and how the knowledge of agents can develop. This paper presents a case study in building an ontology in financial investment. The lessons we learned from the construction process are discussed. Based on our ontology development experience and the current development of ontologies, a framework of next generation ontology construction tools, which is aimed to facilitate the ontology construction, is proposed.

[1]  Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran,et al.  What are ontologies, and why do we need them? , 1999, IEEE Intell. Syst..

[2]  N. F. Noy,et al.  Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology , 2001 .

[3]  Adam Pease,et al.  Towards a standard upper ontology , 2001, FOIS.

[4]  Katia P. Sycara,et al.  Distributed Intelligent Agents , 1996, IEEE Expert.

[5]  Michael R. Genesereth,et al.  Logical foundations of artificial intelligence , 1987 .

[6]  Zili Zhang,et al.  An Agent-Based Soft Computing Society , 2000, Rough Sets and Current Trends in Computing.

[7]  Asunción Gómez-Pérez,et al.  Building a chemical ontology using Methontology and the Ontology Design Environment , 1999, IEEE Intell. Syst..

[8]  Katia Sycara,et al.  Intelligent agents in portfolio management , 1998 .

[9]  R. Stephenson.  A and V , 1962, The British journal of ophthalmology.

[10]  K. Lukka,et al.  The constructive approach in management accounting research , 1993 .

[11]  Stuart E. Madnick,et al.  Knowledge Integration to Overcome Ontological Heterogeneity: Challenges from Financial Information Systems , 2002, ICIS.

[12]  Rudolf Schmid,et al.  Organization for the advancement of structured information standards , 2002 .

[13]  Adam Pease,et al.  The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology: A Large Ontology for the Semantic Web and its Applic ations , 2002 .

[14]  Richard Fikes,et al.  Distributed repositories of highly expressive reusable ontologies , 1999, IEEE Intell. Syst..

[15]  V. C. Ramesh,et al.  From Wall street to main street: reaching out to small investors , 1999, Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. 1999. HICSS-32. Abstracts and CD-ROM of Full Papers.

[16]  Peter D. Karp,et al.  OKBC: A Programmatic Foundation for Knowledge Base Interoperability , 1998, AAAI/IAAI.

[17]  Kai Hwang,et al.  Collaborative and scalable financial analysis with multi-agent technology , 1999, Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. 1999. HICSS-32. Abstracts and CD-ROM of Full Papers.

[18]  Michael Gruninger,et al.  ONTOLOGY Applications and Design , 2002 .