Ontology Development for Asset Concealment Investigation: A Methodological Approach and Case Study in Asset Recovery

The concealment of assets is a critical challenge in financial fraud and asset recovery investigations, posing significant obstacles for creditors and regulatory authorities. National governments commonly possess the necessary data for detecting and combating this type of fraud, typically related to personal data and asset ownership. However, this information is often dispersed across different departments within the same government and sometimes in databases shared by other countries. This leads to difficulty semantically integrating this large amount of data in various formats and correlating entities through identifying hidden relationships, which are essential in this type of analysis. In this regard, this work proposes an ontology to support the data integration process in the domain of asset concealment and recovery and fill the gap in the existence of a public ontology for this domain. The applicability of this ontology in the context of integration between data from different departments and countries was validated. The use of the ontology in a pilot project in the context of a tool for investigating this type of fraud was conducted with a Brazilian government agency, and the users validated its applicability. Finally, a new method for constructing ontologies is proposed. The proposed process was evaluated during the asset concealment ontology building and proved to be more suitable than the similar processes analyzed concerning the partial reuse of existing ontologies and the construction of ontologies for data with a transnational scope.