Formal Concept Analysis Homepage

Formal Concept Analysis Homepage -- Table of Contents/Sitemap -- Uta Priss

Contents: Links -- Introduction -- Examples

Introductions to Formal Concept Analysis

Uta Priss: Introduction to and Overview of Formal Concept Analysis (appeared in Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Vol. 40).
Peter Burmeister's Introduction to FCA and ConImp (pdf)
Bernhard Ganter: Introduction to FCA (postscript)
Wolff, Karl Erich (1994). A first Course in Formal Concept Analysis. Proceedings SoftStat'93. Gustav Fischer Verlag.
Introduction to FCA and User Manuals for ToscanaJ
Slides and exercises from an introductory course taught by G. Stumme. (Mostly in German).
(very short) Introduction and Example

A Short Introduction

Formal Concept Analysis is a theory of data analysis which identifies conceptual structures among data sets. It was introduced by Rudolf Wille in 1982 and has since then grown rapidly. Three well-established annual international conferences (ICFCA, ICCS and CLA) are dedicated to FCA and related methods. The FCA method of formal data analysis has successfully been applied to many fields, such as medicine and psychology, musicology, linguistic databases, library and information science, software re-engineering, civil engineering, ecology, and others. A strong feature of Formal Concept Analysis is its capability of producing graphical visualizations of the inherent structures among data. Especially for social scientists, who often handle data sets that cannot fully be captured in quantitative analyses, Formal Concept Analysis extends the scientific toolbox of formal analysis methods. Statistics and Concept Analysis complement each other in this sense. In the field of information science there is a further application: the mathematical lattices that are used in Formal Concept Analysis can be interpreted as classification systems. Formalized classification systems can be analysed according to the consistency of their relations. Thesauri can automatically be constructed from classes and their attributes, without having to create a hierarchy of classes by hand. As an example, an on-line library catalog using the Conceptual Diagrams of an automatically constructed class hierarchy has been implemented in the ZIT library in Darmstadt.

An example of Formal Concept Analysis

An example of a formal context and a concept lattice (Galois lattice):

More examples