As recently as the last decade or two, data-driven science workflows have become increasingly popular and semantic technology has been relied on to help align often parallel research efforts in the different domains and foster interoperability and data sharing. However, a key challenge is the size of the data and the pace at which it is being generated, so much that manual procedures lag behind. Thus, eliciting automation of most workflows.

In this study, the effort is to continue investigating ways by which some tasks performed by experts in the nanotechnology domain, specifically in ontology engineering, could benefit from automation. An approach, featuring phrase-based topic modelling and formal topical concept analysis is further motivated, together with formal implication rules, to uncover new concepts and axioms relevant to two nanotechnology-related ontologies.

A corpus of 2,715 nanotechnology research articles helps showcase that the approach can scale, as seen in a number of experiments conducted. The usefulness of document text ranking as an alternative form of input to topic models is highlighted as well as the benefit of implication rules to the task of concept discovery. In all, a total of 203 new concepts are uncovered by the approach to extend the referenced ontologies