Tutorial Overview

Formal concept analysis (FCA) [1] is a mathematical discipline which formalizes human conceptual thinking in terms of lattice theory. It constitutes a mathematical field both thorough in theory and successful in practical applications. In the tutorial, we will introduce this field's basic notions and techniques to the Semantic Web audience. Furthermore, we will demonstrate how FCA can fertilize Semantic Web research by presenting and demonstrating implementations which can readily be used to interactively refine arbitrary OWL ontologies in an intuitive way by answering questions about the modeling domain.

Formal Concept Analysis

FCA is a field of applied mathematics that aims to represent knowledge by means of formal contexts.

Semantic Web

The SW is the vision of a machine-interpretable Web enabled by formal specification of semantics.


Description

Until now, the theory of formal concept analysis (FCA) has only had marginal influences on Semantic Web mainstream research despite the fact that it has proven to spawn theoretical insights as well as providing intuitive methods for knowledge representation and modeling. Hence, the tutorial aims at introducing the field of formal concept analysis to Semantic Web researchers and explicates the benefits of this field for Semantic Web theory and applications.

The tutorial's content focuses on the basic notions of FCA as well as the established techniques and algorithms which in our opinion bear a great potential for Semantic Web applications. We will review existing applications of FCA in ontology creation, refinement and evaluation, and present tools and techniques for working with formal contexts (the basic knowledge representation structure in FCA). In a hands-on session, we will demonstrate the usefulness of FCA-based approaches by applying publicly available software to concrete ontology engineering tasks.

The tutorial is targeted at essentially all Semantic Web researchers. Hence, we assume all participants to have basic knowledge in propositional and description logic. Prior knowledge about formal concept analysis is not required, as the tutorial will give a self-contained introduction to that field. For the hands-on session, some practical experience as a software developer or user will be helpful, but not mandatory.


References

[1] Ganter, B., Wille, R.: Formal Concept Analysis: Mathematical Foundations. Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, USA (1997)