ABSTRACT

An ever-existing theme/concern during the development of any ontology is the clustering of industry concepts in a flexible and meaningful manner. The development of clustering mechanism is the cornerstone for taxonomy development. It is inherently an exercise in the balance between the art and the science of doing so. Several advanced data mining techniques are available for automatically discovering common patterns in industry databases. A set of industry needs were then developed to guide the development of the clustering architecture in parallel with an extensive literature reviews of clustering methods/ontology/knowledge management/data mining/lattice theory. Analysis of recursive industry input led to the development of a top-down model for the clustering architecture. i.e. a model that is dependent on researchers’ and industry views of construction concepts. Systematically, the clustering concepts are used to develop types and sub elements of the practical concepts.