Determination and Representation

Abstract

Depending on the circumstances, the task of determining the concept lattice of a context can have different solutions. In the case of a small context, it is useful to start by drawing up a complete list of all concepts. This approach is treated in the first section of this chapter. In the second section, we discuss possibilities to generate line diagrams both automatically or by hand. A list of some dozens of concepts may already be quite difficult to survey, and it requires practice to draw good line diagrams of concept lattices with more than 20 elements. Nested line diagrams permit a satisfactory graphical representation of somewhat larger concept lattices. From some hundred elements at most, a complete graphical representation is no longer possible; in this case it is necessary to apply techniques for splitting up and representing lattices. These will be presented in later chapters.