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, knowledge 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 characterizing 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 simply an equality relation as with standard FDs