Characterization of order-like dependencies with formal concept analysis

Abstract

Functional Dependencies (FDs) play a key role in many fields of the relational database model, one of the most widely used database systems. FDs have also been applied in data analysis, data quality, knowl- edge discovery and the like, but in a very limited scope, because of their fixed semantics. To overcome this limitation, many generalizations have been defined to relax the crisp definition of FDs. FDs and a few of their generalizations have been characterized with Formal Concept Analysis which reveals itself to be an interesting unified framework for charac- terizing dependencies, that is, understanding and computing them in a formal way. In this paper, we extend this work by taking into account order-like dependencies. Such dependencies, well defined in the database field, consider an ordering on the domain of each attribute, and not sim- ply an equality relation as with standard FDs.