A Repository for Formal Contexts
Tom Hanika, Robert Jäschke
TL;DR
The paper addresses the lack of sustainable central repositories for formal context data in Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). It proposes a minimal, git-based repository at fcarepository.org where formal contexts are stored as files under a contexts/ directory with machine-readable metadata, enabling provenance, versioning, forks, PRs, and automatic derivatives via CI. The default file format is ConImp/Burmeister .cxt, UTF-8, with a central metadata file acting as an index to support human and machine processing. The authors discuss governance challenges, advocate for a curation policy and a community-driven working group, and report early implementation steps, including uploading twelve contexts and integrating with a fork of the Python concepts library. The work aims to enhance reproducibility, reuse, and interoperability of FCA data, inviting broader community participation to mature the repository ecosystem.
Abstract
Data is always at the center of the theoretical development and investigation of the applicability of formal concept analysis. It is therefore not surprising that a large number of data sets are repeatedly used in scholarly articles and software tools, acting as de facto standard data sets. However, the distribution of the data sets poses a problem for the sustainable development of the research field. There is a lack of a central location that provides and describes FCA data sets and links them to already known analysis results. This article analyses the current state of the dissemination of FCA data sets, presents the requirements for a central FCA repository, and highlights the challenges for this.