Concept similarity in formal concept analysis

Abstract

The identification of syntactically different concepts that are semantically similar, also referred to as Similarity Reasoning, is fundamental in several research areas such as Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, Cognitive Science and, in particular, in Semantic Web. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is a mathematical framework which is revealing very interesting in supporting fundamental activities for the development of Semantic Web. In order to model uncertainty information, FCA with many-valued contexts is addressed and, in particular, FCA with Ordinal scaling (OFCA), and FCA with Interordinal scaling (IFCA). Concept similarity in IFCA, i.e., in many-valued contexts where attribute values are intervals, is a problem that has been marginally investigated, although the increasing interest in the literature in this topic.