FCA in knowledge technologies: Experiences and opportunities

Abstract

Managing knowledge is a difficult and slippery enterprise. A wide variety of technologies have to be invoked in providing support for knowledge requirements, ranging from the acquisition, modelling, maintenance, retrieval, reuse and publishing of knowledge. Any toolset capable of providing support for these would be valuable as its effects would percolate down to all the application domains structured around the domain representation. Given the generic structure of the lattice building algorithms in Formal Concept Analysis, we undertook a set of experiments to examine its potential utility in knowledge technologies. We elaborate on our experiences and speculate on the opportunities lying ahead for a larger uptake of Formal Concept Analysis approaches.