Conceptual and Spatial Footprints for Complex Systems Analysis: Application to the Semantic Web

This paper advocates the use of Formal Concept Analysis and Galois lattices for complex systems analysis. This method provides an overview of a system by indicating its main areas of interest as well as its level of specificity/generality. Moreover, it proposes possible entry points for navigation by identifying the most significant elements of the system. Automatic filtering of outliers is also provided. This methodology is generic and may be used for any type of complex systems. In this paper, it is applied to the Topic Map formalism which can be used in the context of the Semantic Web to describe any kind of data as well as ontologies. The proposed Conceptual and Spatial Footprints allow the comparison of Topic Maps both in terms of content and structure. Significant concepts and relationships can be identified, as well as outliers; this method can be used to compare the underlying ontologies or datasets as illustrated in an experiment.