Formal Concept Analysis

This first textbook on formal concept analysis gives a systematic presentation of the mathematical foundations and their relations to applications in computer science, especially in data analysis and knowledge processing. Above all, it presents graphical methods for representing conceptual systems that have proved themselves in communicating knowledge. The mathematical foundations are treated thoroughly and are illuminated by means of numerous examples, making the basic theory readily accessible in compact form.

Formal concept analysis has been developed as a field of applied mathematics based on the mathematization of concept and concept hierarchy. It thereby allows us to mathematically represent, analyze, and construct conceptual structures. The formal concept analysis approach has been proven successful in a wide range of application fields. This book constitutes a comprehensive and systematic presentation of the state of the art of formal concept analysis and its applications. The first part of the book is devoted to foundational and methodological topics. The contributions in the second part demonstrate how formal concept analysis is successfully used outside of mathematics, in linguistics, text retrieval, association rule mining, data analysis, and economics. The third part presents applications in software engineering.

The book studies the existing and potential connections between Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) by showing how standard SNA techniques, usually based on graph theory, can be supplemented by FCA methods, which rely on lattice theory. The book presents contributions to the following areas: acquisition of terminological knowledge from social networks, knowledge communities, individuality computation, other types of FCA-based analysis of bipartite graphs (two-mode networks), multimodal clustering, community detection and description in one-mode and multi-mode networks, adaptation of the dual-projection approach to weighted bipartite graphs, extensions to the Kleinberg's HITS algorithm as well as attributed graph analysis.

FCA is an important formalism that is associated with a variety of research areas such as lattice theory, knowledge representation, data mining, machine learning, and semantic Web. It is successfully exploited in an increasing number of application domains such as software engineering, information retrieval, social network analysis, and bioinformatics. Its mathematical power comes from its concept lattice formalization in which each element in the lattice captures a formal concept while the whole structure represents a conceptual hierarchy that offers browsing, clustering and association rule mining. Complex data analytics refers to advanced methods and tools for mining and analyzing data with complex structures such as XML/Json data, text and image data, multidimensional data, graphs, sequences and streaming data. It also covers visualization mechanisms used to highlight the discovered knowledge. This edited book examines a set of important and relevant research directions in complex data management, and updates the contribution of the FCA community in analyzing complex and large data such as knowledge graphs and interlinked contexts. For example, Formal Concept Analysis and some of its extensions are exploited, revisited and coupled with recent processing parallel and distributed paradigms to maximize the benefits in analyzing large data.

Designing is one of the most significant of human acts. Surprisingly, given that designing has been occurring for many millenia, our understanding of the processes of designing is remarkably limited. Recently, design methods have been formalised not as humano-centred processes but as processes capable of computer implementation with the goal of augmenting human designers. This volume contains contributions which cover design methods based on evolutionary systems, generative processes, evaluation methods and analysis methods. It presents the state of the art in formal design methods for computer aided design.

This volume contains the Proceedings of ICFCA 2004, the 2nd International Conference on Formal Concept Analysis. The ICFCA conference series aims to be the premier forum for the publication of advances in applied lattice and order theory and in particular scienti?c advances related to formal concept analysis. Formal concept analysis emerged in the 1980s from e?orts to restructure lattice theory to promote better communication between lattice theorists and potentialusersoflatticetheory.Sincethen,the?eldhasdevelopedintoagrowing research area in its own right with a thriving theoretical community and an increasing number of applications in data and knowledge processing including data visualization, information retrieval, machine learning, data analysis and knowledge management. In terms of theory, formal concept analysis has been extended into attribute exploration, Boolean judgment, contextual logic and so on to create a powerful general framework for knowledge representation and reasoning. This conference aims to unify theoretical and applied practitioners who use formal concept an- ysis, drawing on the ?elds of mathematics, computer and library sciences and software engineering. The theme of the 2004 conference was ‘Concept Lattices” to acknowledge the colloquial term used for the line diagrams that appear in almost every paper in this volume. ICFCA 2004 included tutorial sessions, demonstrating the practical bene?ts of formal concept analysis, and highlighted developments in the foundational theory and standards. The conference showcased the increasing variety of formal concept analysis software and included eight invited lectures from distinguished speakersinthe?eld.Sevenoftheeightinvitedspeakerssubmittedaccompanying papers and these were reviewed and appear in this volume.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Formal Concept Analysis, ICFCA 2017, held in Rennes, France, in June 2017. The 13 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 37 submissions. The book also contains an invited contribution and a historical paper translated from German and originally published in “Die Klassifkation und ihr Umfeld”, edited by P. O. Degens, H. J. Hermes, and O. Opitz, Indeks-Verlag, Frankfurt, 1986. The field of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) originated in the 1980s in Darmstadt as a subfield of mathematical order theory, with prior developments in other research groups. Its original motivation was to consider complete lattices as lattices of concepts, drawing motivation from philosophy and mathematics alike. FCA has since then developed into a wide research area with applications much beyond its original motivation, for example in logic, data mining, learning, and psychology.

This volume contains the Proceedings of ICFCA 2005, the 3rd International Conference on Formal Concept Analysis. The ICFCA conference series aims to be the premier forum for the publication of advances in applied lattice and order theory, and in particular scienti?c advances related to formal concept analysis. Formal concept analysis is a ?eld of applied mathematics with its mat- matical root in order theory, in particular in the theory of complete lattices. Researchers had long been aware of the fact that these ?elds have many - tential applications. Formal concept analysis emerged in the 1980s from e?orts to restructure lattice theory to promote better communication between lattice theorists and potential users of lattice theory. The key theme was the mathe- tization of concept and conceptual hierarchy. Since then, the ?eld has developed into a growing research area in its own right with a thriving theoretical com- nity and an increasing number of applications in data and knowledge processing, including data visualization, information retrieval, machine learning, data an- ysis and knowledge management. ICFCA2005re?ectedbothpracticalbene?tsandprogressinthefoundational theory of formal concept analysis. Algorithmic aspects were discussed as well as e?orts to broaden the ?eld. All regular papers appearing in this volume were refereed by at least two, in most cases three independent reviewers. The ?nal decision to accept the papers was arbitrated by the Program Chairs based on the referee reports. It was the involvement of the Program Committee and the Editorial Board that ensured the scienti?c quality of these proceedings.