Contexts: A formal definition of worlds of assertions

Abstract

For many years now on-going discussions, not to say endless discussions, about the intrinsic definition of contexts have been at the center stage of every single meeting of the conceptual graph community. It is our opinion that this lack of consensus about contexts is in direct relation to its lack of a formal definition. As a matter of fact, no formal definition of contexts was given up to this moment, not even in John Sowa’s original book. Being a vital issue in conceptual graph theory, this paper addresses the problem of providing formal semantics to the definition of contexts, when used for information packaging. It proposes a definitional framework for contexts, based on formal concept analysis [17], bridging these two research areas. It also presents how querying a knowledge base structured as a lattice of contexts can be done.