Automated layout of concept lattices using layered diagrams and additive diagrams

Abstract

Drawings of concept lattices provide the most common mechanism for the communication of structure extracted from data via the process of formal concept analysis. To communicate structure, diagrams of concept lattices are usually made to be additive. Additive diagrams, however, suffer from some unaesthetic properties. Alternatively a common graph drawing approach to the layout of partially ordered sets (of which lattices are a sub-class) is via a layered diagram. The paper presents a mechanism for the layout of concept lattices that combines ideas from both additive and layered diagrams. These new hybrid diagrams preserve the structural aspects of additive diagrams while achieving the aesthetic quality of layered diagrams. Furthermore, a search method is presented that optimizes the layout with respect to structural and aesthetic objective functions.