What else can be extracted from ontologies? Influence rules

A method for extracting new implicit knowledge from ontologies by using an inductive/deductive approach is presented. The new extracted knowledge takes the form of If-Then rules annotated with a weight. Such rules, termed Influence Rules, specify how the values of the properties bound to a collection of concepts may influence the values of the properties of another concept.The technique, that combines data mining and link analysis, is completely general and applicable to whatever domain. The paper reports the methods and the algorithms supporting the process of mining the rules out of the ontology, and discusses its application to real data from the economic field.