Interactive Collaborative Exploration using Incomplete Contexts

Abstract

A common representation of information about relations of objects and attributes in knowledge domains are data-tables. The structure of such information can be analysed using Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). Attribute exploration is a knowledge acquisition method from FCA that reveals dependencies in a set of attributes with help of a domain expert. However, in general no single expert is capable (time-and knowledge-wise) of exploring knowledge domains alone. Therefore it is important to develop methods that allow multiple experts to explore domains together. To this end we build upon results on representation of incomplete knowledge [2, 8-10], adapt the corresponding version of attribute exploration to fit the setting of multiple experts and suggest formalizations for key components like expert knowledge, interaction and collaboration strategy. Furthermore we discuss ways of comparing collaboration strategies and suggest avenues for future research.

Triadic Exploration and Exploration with Multiple Experts

“…However, most of the extensions and variants of attribute exploration that have been studied are based on the idea of a single expert answering the questions. As far as we know, there exist only a few papers that mention exploration with multiple experts, notably: Paper [16] deals with how to perform exploration in parallel and potentially offers a way to speed up the exploration with multiple experts; [10] addresses collaborative conceptual exploration based on the notions of local experts for subdomains of a given knowledge domain; and [2] studies attribute exploration in a collaborative exploration setting with multiple experts who share the same view on the domain but only have partial knowledge thereof.…”

“…If we take a closer look at the publications mentioned before, we see that all three avoid this issue in their own way. In [16] the experts all have the same complete knowledge about the domain; in [10] the local experts have partial knowledge about the same consistent domain knowledge; and, in [2] the problem was also avoided by defining expert knowledge as partial knowledge of some consistent domain knowledge.…”