About

ConExp-NG is a simple GUI-centric tool for the study & research of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) that allows you to create formal contexts, draw concept lattices and explore dependencies between attributes. Formal Concept Analysis is a branch of lattice theory and provides the mathematical foundation for ConExp-NG. Have a look at the Links if you want to find out more about the theory behind ConExp-NG. ConExp-NG, whose name stands for Concept Explorer Next Generation, is not an entirely original creation but a modern reimplementation of a similar tool by the name of Concept Explorer with a focus on usability, maintainability and extensibility.

Characteristics

Why a new FCA tool? What sets ConExp-NG apart from other FCA tools, in particular ConExp?

TODO

• (like conexp) is written in java and uses swing so it is cross-platform and uses a mainstream language that should be familiar to a lot of developers
• Developer Friendlyness
• Moderness
• Clean code
• we made sure that the architecture of the code is sound and comprehensible
• Modularity & reusability (libfca, lattice-algorithms)
• Using established tools like Maven
• Better platform for collaboration (GitHub)
• leads to Maintainabilit & extensibility, a big problem of ConExp
• Usability
• Weblaf
• less redundancy (usability+less redundancy+sound architecture -> e.g. computations-by-need)
• Unterfangen um Kristallisationspunkt für weitere FCA-Tool-Experimente zu bieten
• Problem: Es gibt zwar viele halbgare, verstreute Projekte aber nichts wirklich wiederverwendbares, deshalb hat ConExp-NG auch auf fcalib bspw. aufgebaut und verbessert, andere Projekte können das nun auch tun und sich am ConExp-NG Code für Nutzung von fcalib orientieren, sodass nicht das Rad neu erfunden werden muss
• ...
• Comparison with conexp-clj: conexp-clj is advanced, shell-centric tool for experts, ConExp-NG is simple, GUI-centric tool for beginners & experts
• Comparison with Concept Explorer FX

TODO: use infos from our ausarbeitung in the dropbox

History

TODO

TODO: use infos from our ausarbeitung in the dropbox

TODO: Somehow work this documents into text

• fcalib questions
• ConExp2 GUI Concept: Provides a condensed explanation for our concrete deviations from ConExp's GUI.
• Road Map: Describes what we want to achieve in our determined schedule and how we want to do it.
• ConExp Functionality: ConExp's use cases / functionality which we want to imitate & ideas for improvements of paper-cuts.
• Analysis of ConExp's Source Code: A high level description of ConExp's basic code structure to serve as a foundation which we can imitate & improve.