Papers and Posters

Abstract

What name can do alone: An Application of Formal Concept Analysis with Rough Set Approximation to Multiple Hierarchies Visualisation by TaxoNote Comparator
Nozomi Ytow ¹, Akira Sato ², David R. Morse ³ and David McL. Roberts ^4
1 Institute of Biological Sciences / Gene Research Center, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8572, Japan
² Institute of Information Sciences and Electronics / Science Information Processing Center, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8577, Japan
³ Faculty of Mathematics and Computing, The Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, United Kingdom
⁴ Department of Zoology, The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD, United Kingdom

Taxonomy is a set of sets, i.e. hierarchically structured taxa. It is insufficient for taxonomy to apply a set theory, either axiomatic set theory or naive set theory, because it is too "stiff" for axiomatic theory or too "flexible" for naive theory. Because equivalence of sets in axiomatic set theory based on enumeration of their elements, addition of a new, identified specimen to the specimen set modifies the taxon concept even though the specimen well fit to the circumscription (by characters) of the taxon. The naive set theory allows confusion like Russell's paradox, or, it requires type theory to prohibit such misuse of set. The type theory is, however, unacceptable because it implies strong dependency on rank. Rise or down of a taxon without any modification of circumscription "changes" the taxon concept if we rely on type theory.

We applied formal concept analysis with rough set approximation to relax the restriction in set theory described above. Based on the theoretical analysis, we implemented a demonstrator called Comparator as part of TaxoNote, a graphical user interface for the Nomenucrator data structure. The Comparator analyses given name hierarchies to produce a set of tables containing names depending on relationships between names.