Formal concept analysis: current trends and directions

Abstract

Formalization of human thinking helps in fostering the process of learning by giving an explicit representation to human thoughts. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) finds it's core here. It considers a "concept" as a formal unit of human thought. A concept is represented as a set of inter related objects called the extent and the set of the properties of these objects, called the intent. Making use of the mathematical principles of Lattice Theory and Map Theory of Abstract Algebra, a set of tools and algorithms have been developed in FCA. These helps us to analyze and represent any context as a relation between it's extent and intent. Concepts drawn from the subsets of the extent and intent can be organized in the form of a lattice giving a subsumption hierarchy. Such concept lattices could be maintained by different operations on the lattice like scaling, pruning, navigating etc. A host of applications and software have been developed over the years which serves the usage of FCA tools and processes for specific purposes in various fields. This paper reviews the theoretical foundation, research and applications of FCA in different areas. The paper projects current trends in FCA and concludes with a discussion on open issues and limitations of FCA.