Bernhard Ganter - Böcker

Formal Concept Analysis is a field of applied mathematics based on the math­ematization of concept and conceptual hierarchy. Additionally, the book contains an entirely new chapter on contextual concept logic, including a section on description logics and relational concept analysis.

Formal Concept Analysis is a field of applied mathematics based on the math­ematization of concept and conceptual hierarchy. It thereby activates math­ematical thinking for conceptual data analysis and knowledge processing. The underlying notion of “concept” evolved early in the philosophical theory of concepts and still has effects today. In mathematics it played a special role during the emergence of mathematical logic in the 19th century. Subsequently, however, it had virtually no impact on mathematical thinking. It was not until 1979 that the topic was revisited and treated more thoroughly.Since then, Formal Concept Analysis has fully emerged, sparking a multitude of publications for which the first edition of this textbook established itself as the standard reference in the literature, with a total of 10000+ citations. This is the second edition, revised and extended, of the textbook published originally in German (1996) and translated into English (1999), giving a systematic presentation of the mathematical foundations while also focusing on their possible applications for data analysis and knowledge processing. In times of digital knowledge processing, formal methods of conceptual analysis are gaining in importance. The book makes the basic theory for such methods accessible in a compact form, and presents graphical methods for representing concept systems that have proved themselves essential in communicating knowledge.The textbook complements each chapter with further notes, references and trends, putting the work in modern context and highlighting potential directions for further research. Additionally, the book contains an entirely new chapter on contextual concept logic, including a section on description logics and relational concept analysis. As such, it should be a valuable resource for students, instructors and researchers at the crossroads of subject areas like Applied and Discrete Mathematics, Logics, Theoretical Computer Science, Knowledge Processing, Data Science, and is meant to be used both for research and in class, as a teaching resource.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Joint Conference on Conceptual Knowledge Structures, CONCEPTS 2025, held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, during September 8–12, 2025. The 25 full papers and 2 short papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 33 submissions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Formal Concept Analysis, ICFCA 2005, held in Lens, France in February 2005.The 28 revised full papers presented together with an invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers reflect both progress in the foundational theory of formal concept analysis and its practical applications; algorithmic aspects are discussed as well as efforts to broaden the field.

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 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS 2003, held in Dresden, Germany in July 2003.The 23 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected for presentation. The papers are organized in topical sections on the many facets of conceptual structures, logical and linguistic aspects, conceptual representation of time and space, deepening the formal theory and applications of conceptual structures.

Dieses erste Lehrbuch zur Formalen Begriffsanalyse gibt eine systematische Darstellung der mathematischen Grundlagen und ihrer Verbindung zu Anwendungen in der Informatik, insbesondere in der Datenanalyse und Wissensverarbeitung. Das Buch vermittelt vor allem Methoden der graphischen Darstellung von Begriffssystemen, die sich in der Wissenskommunikation bestens bewährt haben. Theorie und graphische Darstellung werden dabei eng miteinander verknüpft. Die mathematischen Grundlagen werden vollständig abgehandelt und durch zahlreiche Beispiele anschaulich gemacht. Da zur Wissensverarbeitung immer stärker der Computer genutzt wird, gewinnen formale Methoden begrifflicher Analyse überall an Bedeutung. Das Buch macht die dafür grundlegende Theorie in kompakter Form zugänglich.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS 2000, held in Darmstadt, Germany in August 2000. The 38 revised full papers presented have been carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. The book is divided in topical sections on concepts and language, conceptual onthology, conceptual graphs, formal semantics of conceptual structures, contextual logic and formal concept analysis, conceptual structures in practice, and computational aspects of conceptual structures.

Die Ordnungstheorie ist ein faszinierendes Teilgebiet der Diskreten Mathematik, das praktischen Nutzen und abstrakte mathematische Theorie, anschauliche Überlegungen und schwierige Forschungsprobleme auf manchmal verblüffende Art miteinander verbindet.

The papers present current research from a thriving theoretical community and a rapidly expanding range of applications in information and knowledge processing including data visualization and analysis (mining), knowledge management, as well as Web semantics, and software engineering.

This is the first textbook on attribute exploration, its theory, its algorithms forapplications, and some of its many possible generalizations. Attribute explorationis useful for acquiring structured knowledge through an interactive process, byasking queries to an expert. Generalizations that handle incomplete, faulty, orimprecise data are discussed, but the focus lies on knowledge extraction from areliable information source.The method is based on Formal Concept Analysis, a mathematical theory ofconcepts and concept hierarchies, and uses its expressive diagrams. The presentationis self-contained. It provides an introduction to Formal Concept Analysiswith emphasis on its ability to derive algebraic structures from qualitative data,which can be represented in meaningful and precise graphics.