by   Martin Kovár, Marie Klimešová, Štěpán Křehlík

Formal concept and formal context are two key notions of Formal Concept Analysis, introduced by B. Ganter and R. Wille at the end of the 70's. They are used in theoretical computer scince for various purposes, but especially in connection with data representation, organization and analysis. An important characteristic of a formal cotext is the generalized distance between its concepts. There are several modifications how it could be defined, in general it serves as a measure of similarity of these two concepts. A formal concept could be an object or a class of objects of a very general type, including mathematical or information structures, but not only. Among many other possibilities, there can be mentioned various algebraic or topological structures, data structures, models, dynamical systems, etc.

Our experimental application Formal Concept Atribute Distances checks first if the formal context and its two formal concepts are correctly given by the input. If so it calculates the four modifications of the generalized distance between the two given concepts. The calcullation is based on the properties of the framework associated with the formal context on the set of its attributes. The notion of a generalized distance is inspired by the notion of partial metrics due to S. Matthews. A source of inspiration of this application is also the joint research of the first author with his former student, A. Chernikava during her doctoral study. The coauthors, M. Klimešová and Š. Křeklík are the current doctoral students of the Department of Mathematics.