Continuous Domains in Formal Concept Analysis*

Abstract

Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) has been proven to be an effective method of restructuring complete lattices and various algebraic domains. In this paper, the notion of contractive mappings over formal contexts is proposed, which can be viewed as a generalization of interior operators on sets into the framework of FCA. Then, by considering subset-selections consistent with contractive mappings, the notions of attribute continuous formal contexts and continuous concepts are introduced. It is shown that the set of continuous concepts of an attribute continuous formal context forms a continuous domain, and every continuous domain can be restructured in this way. Moreover, the notion of F-morphisms is identified to produce a category equivalent to that of continuous domains with Scott continuous functions. The paper also investigates the representations of various subclasses of continuous domains including algebraic domains and stably continuous semilattices.