Semantic Data Mining

Abstract

Over the past few decades, data mining has emerged as a field of research critical to understanding and assimilating the large stores of data accumulated by corporations, government agencies, and laboratories. Early on, mining algorithms and techniques were limited to relational data sets coming directly from On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems, or from a consolidated enterprise data warehouse. However, recent work has begun to extend the limits of data mining strategies to include “semi-structured data such as HTML and XML texts, symbolic sequences, ordered trees and relations represented by advanced logics.” (Washio and Motoda, 2003) The goal of any data mining endeavor is to detect and extract patterns in the data sets being examined. Semantic data mining is a novel approach that makes use of graph topology, one of the most fundamental and generic mathematical constructs, and semantic meaning, to scan semi-structured data for patterns. This technique has the potential to be especially powerful as graph data representation can capture so many types of semantic relationships. Current research efforts in this field are focused on utilizing graph-structured semantic information to derive complex and meaningful relationships in a wide variety of application areas- - national security and web mining being foremost among these. In this article, we review significant segments of recent data mining research that feed into semantic data mining and describe some promising application areas.