Abstract
Where posets are used to represent taxonomies, concept lattices, or information ordered databases there is a need to engineer algorithms that search, update, and transform posets. This paper demonstrates an approach to designing such algorithms. It presents a picture of covering relation traversals that characterises these in terms of up-set and down-set expressions involving union, intersection, and difference. It then provides a detailed analysis of three types of covering relation traversal. The approach is demonstrated by describing a suite of derived algorithms. The intention is to express a manner of decomposing mathematical problems into poset traversals, and to provide context to the selection a particular traversal algorithm. This line of work has previously been pursued by [1]. However, the success and influence of Formal Concept Analysis [2] has shifted the emphasis from posets to lattices, and from algorithms that operate on the graph of the partial order to the formal context. This paper contributes a methodology for the renewed investigation of poset algorithms, with the potential to lead to improvements in algorithms such as the online completion to a lattice.
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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Burrow, A. (2009). Algorithm Design Using Traversals of the Covering Relation. In: Rudolph, S., Dau, F., Kuznetsov, S.O. (eds) Conceptual Structures: Leveraging Semantic Technologies. ICCS 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5662. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03079-6_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03079-6_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-03078-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-03079-6
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