Towards a Temporal Extension of Formal Concept Analysis.pdfVIP

Towards a Temporal Extension of Formal Concept Analysis Rabih Neouchi, Ahmed Y. Tawfik, and Richard A. Fros t School of Computer Science, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario N9B 3P4, Canada {neouchi, atawfik, richard}@cs.uwindsor.ca Abstract. This article presents method a for analyzing the e volution of concepts represented by concept lattices in a time stamped d atabase, showing how the concepts that evolve with time induce a change in t he concept lattice. The purpose of this work is to extend formal concept an alysis to handle temporal properties and represent temporally evolving attrib utes. Introduction1 Formal concept analysis (FCA) [2, 7, 14] is a mathe matical tool for analyzing data and formally representing conceptual knowledge. FCA helps forming conceptual structures from data. Such structures consist of un its, which are formal abstractions of concepts of human thought allowing meaningful and c omprehensible interpretation. FCA is mathematical a discipline whose features inc lude: − Visualizing inherent properties in data sets, − Interactively exploring attributes of objects and t heir corresponding contexts, and − Formally classifying systems based on relations