Relational Scaling and Databases

More than 20 years of theoretical development and practical experience in the field of Conceptual Information Systems have made available a wide variety of structure and procedures to gain new knowledge from data or to present it in a user-friendly way, by restructuring the data in a conceptual way to help the user interpret and understand the meaning. Even longer, Database Theory has helped develop highly efficient database systems, processing daily huge amounts of data. However, both theories can profit from a cooperation: on the one hand, data and database modeling methodologies could be applied to the building of Conceptual Information System, the connection between the presented conceptual structures and the original data can be clarified. On the other hand, database theory may profit from the experience and ideas for more user-centered interfaces to the stored data, as well as profit from the translation of theoretical results. In this paper, we present the first necessary steps to perform a translation between the languages used in both domains. For this purpose, we introduce basic notions from Database Theory with a focus on the operations, which are basic for a first application: a more formal way to describe the process of Relational Scaling [PW99] and the transformation of data for Conceptual Information Systems in general. Conversely, we present an approach for a standard problem of database theory by using methods from Formal Concept Analysis. Finally, we discuss the next steps needed for the integration of these two theories.