Formal Concept Analysis in knowledge processing: A survey on models and techniques

This is the first part of a large survey paper in which we analyze recent literature on Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) and some closely related disciplines using FCA. We collected 1072 papers published between 2003 and 2011 mentioning terms related to Formal Concept Analysis in the title, abstract and keywords. We developed a knowledge browsing environment to support our literature analysis process. We use the visualization capabilities of FCA to explore the literature, to discover and conceptually represent the main research topics in the FCA community. In this first part, we zoom in on and give an extensive overview of the papers published between 2003 and 2011 on developing FCA-based methods for knowledge processing. We also give an overview of the literature on FCA extensions such as pattern structures, logical concept analysis, relational concept analysis, power context families, fuzzy FCA, rough FCA, temporal and triadic concept analysis and discuss scalability issues.