Formal Concept Analysis

In information science, formal concept analysis is a principled way of deriving a concept hierarchy or formal ontology from a collection of objects and their properties. Each concept in the hierarchy represents the set of objects sharing the same values for a certain set of properties; and each sub-concept in the hierarchy contains a subset of the objects in the concepts above it. The term was introduced by Rudolf Wille in 1984, and builds on applied lattice and order theory that was developed by Garrett Birkhoff and others in the 1930s.

Formal concept analysis finds practical application in fields including data mining, text mining, machine learning, knowledge management, semantic web, software development, chemistryand biology.

At the 13th International Conference on Concept Lattices and Their Applications Bernhard Ganter make a report in which he formulated main tasks for FCA-community:

• Make usefulness explicit.
• Improve the usability.
• Broaden.
• Conquer.
• Standardize.
• Modernize.
• Find better forms of teaching FCA.
• Deepen.