FCAView Tab plug-in provides Protégé-2000 users a novel way to visualize their ontologies using the formal concept analysis (FCA) technique.

FCA, a mathematical approach to data analysis based on lattice theory, has been advocated to support ontology building in several studies. Generally speaking, there are three elements to form a formal context: a set of formal objects, a set of formal attributes and the binary relations between them. The formal context is usually formed using a cross table, and graphically it also can be visualized using a lattice diagram. The two ways contain the same information about the formal context.

In the FCAView Tab, we hooked the protégé-2000 with an open source software Concept Explorer version 1.2. We developed two versions of visualization tools as follows.

1) FCAView Tab for core Protégé ontology

2) OWLFCAView Tab for Protégé OWL ontology

 


Level of Support

The FCAView Tab plug-in is still under active development. We would like to obtain any comments and advices from you.

Any questions about the tab, please contact to: Guoqian Jiang , Department of Medical Informatics, Hokkaido University Graduate School of Medicine.

 

License

The FCAView Tab plug-in will become an open source soon.

 

References

Jiang G, et al. Context-based ontology building support for clinical domains using formal concept analysis. Int J Med Inform. 2003 Aug;71(1):71-81. (PubMed citation)

Jiang G, et al. Concept-oriented view generation for clinical data using formal concept analysis. Proceedings of JCMI2004, Nagoya, Japan, November, 2004.

Jiang G, et al. FCAViewTab: A concept-oriented view generation tool for clinical data using formal concept analysis. Proceedings of the 8th International Protégé Conference, Madrid, Spain, July, 2005.