Article,
A Software Tool For Data Analysis Based On Formal Concept Analysis
Studia Universitatis Babes – Bolyai, Informatica, Volume LIII (2): 67-78 (2008)
Abstract
Formal Concept Analysis is a useful tool to represent logical implications in datasets, to analyze the underground knowledge that lies behind large amounts of data. A database relation can be seen as a many-valued context 3. J. Hereth in 4 introduces the formal context of functional dependencies. In this context, implications hold for functional dependencies. We develop a software application that analyzes an existing relational data table and detect functional dependencies in it. The user can choose to analyze a table from a MS SQL Server, Oracle or MySQL database and the software will build the formal context of functional dependencies. We use Conexp 6 to build the concept lattice and implications in this context. These implications will be the functional dependencies for the analyzed table. Having the functional dependencies, we can detect candidate keys and we can decide if the table is in 2NF or 3NF or BCNF. To our knowledge, this method was not implemented yet.
