## 5 Proposal for an Asset Concealment Ontology
### Ontology Evaluation
#### 5.3.2 User-Based Evaluation  
Stakeholders identified many issues during the ontology instantiation process. Initially, they pointed out the difficulty in merging data from similar entities found in different databases since the records do not always have a unique identifier. Data on legal proceedings in Brazil, for example, are published, for the most part, only with the names of those involved. This makes it challenging to associate entities due to the possible occurrence of homonyms. Another problem involving homonyms occurs when the relationship between person-type entities is stored through an attribute in the database containing only the other entity's name. An example is the relationship of type isMotherOf between two entities of type person. In many cases, only the mother's name appears in the person's registration, raising problems when integrating mothers with the same name. A third issue involved the format of the input data, which in several cases was unstructured, preventing the automatic association of entities and relationships. Data from legal proceedings in Brazil are an example of this problem, as they are published in  
Figure 7: Object properties. unstructured text format, which prevents the exact identification of entities without using a model for extraction. There are also errors in filling out data or using different attributes to designate the same concept. In the first case, two entities with the same unique ID can have different attribute values from similar records in different databases. In the second case, it is possible to find an attribute with the name of a person's mother in one database and an attribute with the name of the child of a person in another database. If these two entities are mother and child of each other, we would have two different relationship types to define just one link between them. The last aspect observed was the suitability of the proposed ontology to the user requirements gathered during the application field and scope definition stage and described in Table 4. In order for the proposed ontology to be effectively validated, it must address all of these user requirements. The analysis of the fulfillment of these requirements is presented in Table 15. This table records the evidence that the ontology addresses each of the user's needs. For example, the ontology addresses the requirement to identify asset concealment through the use of relatives (\"Fraudsters often place their assets in the name of relatives, such as parents, siblings, or spouses, to mask the true owner and avoid asset seizure\") by implementing relationship types such as isMotherOf, isFatherOf, or isSpouseOf (\"These relationship types have the capability to identify not only direct relationships, such as parents and children, but also indirect ones, such as grandparents, cousins, uncles, etc.\"). In addition, the ontology addresses the requirement of identification of asset concealment through the use of companies (\"Individuals hide assets by creating or using existing companies, often setting up complex ownership structures with distributed shareholding to obscure the true ownership\") by creating relationships between companies and their partners through the IS_PARTNER relationship (\"Mapping company data, especially concerning partners, allows this requirement to be met (IS_PARTNER). Additionally, the semantics associated with this type of relationship even allow the detection of the use of a network of companies by traversing the graph\".) People also tend to conceal assets by holding them with friends, neighbors, or close associates, further distancing the true owner from the property. Individuals hide assets by creating or using existing companies, often setting up complex ownership structures with distributed shareholding to obscure the true ownership. This can involve shell companies or multiple layers of corporate entities across different jurisdictions. The proposed ontology maps more than a dozen types of assets often used by fraudsters to hide assets.