Preface

Abstract

Ordinal and symbolic data analysis (OSDA98)The conference was held at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA on September 28-30, 1998. It continues a sequence of conferences which started with two conferences on Ordinal Data Analysis in March 1992 at the TH Darmstadt and in October 1993 at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) and continued with the International Conference on Ordinal and Symbolic Data Analysis in June 1995 at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications (Paris), as well as the Ordinal and Symbolic Data Analysis Conference in March, 1997 at TH Darmstadt. The next conference in this series (OSDA2000) will be held in Belgium in July, 2000. The local organizer will be Professor Jean-Paul Doignon. Further information can be obtained from him via email: [email protected]The theme of the conferences is motivated by the fact that ordinal and symbolic data occur quite frequently, but theoretical tools for handling ordinal and symbolic data are not sufficiently developed. The conference included several invited addresses, sessions for contributed papers, and two special sessions: one on Knowledge Spaces organized by Professors Jean-Paul Doignon and Jean-Claude Falmagne; with a second on on Applications to Medicine organized by William Shannon. The organizing committee for the conference consisted of E. Diday (Paris), M. F. Janowitz (Amherst), and R. Wille (Darmstadt). Immediately following the conference there were three tutorials. One was organized by Professor Edwin Diday, and involved an exposition of Symbolic Data Analysis. The second one was organized by Professor Dr. Rudolf Wille in the general area of Formal Concept Analysis. The third tutorial was organized by Professors Jean-Paul Doignon and Jean-Claude Falmagne with the help of Eric Cosyn. It involved lectures on Knowledge Spaces and a demonstration of some computer software designed as an aid to K12 Mathematics Education.As can be seen from the Program of talks, the Conference viewed both ordinal and symbolic data analysis in a very broad sense. The talks ranged from abstract theoretical models, to a discussion of the underlying philosophy of data analysis, to the development of algorithms, to the announcement of results applied to real world situations. The applications mentioned were quite diverse.This volume will be organized in four parts. There first appears a series of 11 papers that expand and in some cases supplement actual talks given at the Conference. Following this, there is a list of abstracts of the remining invited addresses. This is followed by abstracts of the remaining contributed talks. Finally, there is a section devoted to abstracts of the three tutorials.The conference organizers wish to thank Dr. Peter Hammer, the editor of Discrete Applied Mathematics, as well as the staff of Elsevier Publishing for giving us this opportunity to circulate the results of the conference.