fca-viz

Tool for formal concept analysis visualization

Setup

FCA

1. Create an Xcode project and copy the contents of FCA_viz (concept.cpp, concept.h, set_ops.h)

• Within the same directory, open Terminal and run the following two lines:

$ touch input.txt     # Contains input dataset
$ touch com.txt       # File of commands (may be left blank)

2. Return to the root directory and open script.sh

• On line 1, change FCA_XCODE to the absolute path of the Xcode project from the previous step
• On line 2, change VIZ to the location of the viz folder within the root directory

Visualization

1. To set up, cd into the viz directory and run:

$ bash setup_mac.sh    # Installs necessary packages

Usage

Simply run:

$ bash script.sh

This will lead you through the following steps:

1. Input file: Insert a Boolean dataset of m lines and n characters per line

• A '1' denotes that the object on that line has the attribute at that column, '0' means it does not:

1010    # Object 1 has attributes {1,3}
0110    # Object 2 has attributes {2,3}
1101    # Object 3 has attributes {1,2,4}

2. Commands file (optional): Fill with set operations to compute on the dataset

• Indicate a single command on each line in the format of <cmd> <e_0> <e_1> ... <e_n>
  • <cmd> is a character indicating the type of set operation:
    • c: closure
    • b: boundary
    • i: interior
    • d: derived set
    • s: isolated point
  • <e_i> is member i of the extent set parameter
• Example:

c 1 2 3   # Find closure given extent set {1,2,3}
s 4 5     # Find the isolated point given extent set {4,5}

3. Run program: Click the 'run' button when the Xcode project appears to generate output .txt files

• The results of any set operations will be seen in the Xcode output window

4. View output concept lattice

• An image of the resulting concept lattice will appear
• This is saved in the viz directory as output.png