User Documentation

How to create your first lattice in 5 minutes

Launching RCAExplore

While many options are available through the commandline, you should be able to launch RCAExplore by double-clicking on the jar file on most of the operating systems available.

Creating a formal context

• create a formal context by going to RCF > Add formal context
• add objects by clicking the button Add in the Row actions part
• add attributes by clicking the button Add in the Column actions part
• add object-attributes pairs by ticking the boxes in the table

That's it for a first formal context, more options permit you to rename objects and attributes. You also can save your context in RCFT format by going to File > Save As...

Generating the lattice

• go to File > Launch RCA
• chose a folder to put your result into
• ignore the proposed options and click OK

• click on Continue and chose the automode

That's it, you should see new files appearing in the folder you have chosen.

Viewing the lattice

In your folder you will find several files and some of them have an extension .dot. Those files can be used to generate graphical vizualisations of your latlice using graphviz. RCA is a multistep process, so the file you might want is the step describing the last step, here named step0-0.dot.

To generate a picture file you can launch graphviz using the command line:
dot -Tjpeg step1-0.dot -o step1-0.jpg

This will generate a file step1-0.jpg that can be viewed by most picture viewer.

Launching RCAExplore

Relational Context Family editor

commandline:

java -jar rcaexplore.jar [editor [<file>]]

Tool for creating a relational context family. Can only load RCFT file formatbut can generate LaTeX and Galicia files.

Interactive concept generator

commandline:

java -jar rcaexplore.jar explogui [<file><folder>]

will launch the explorer version of RCA with a graphical user interface on file and output the result in folder

java -jar rcaexplore.jar explocli 

will launch the explorer version of RCA with a commandline interface on file and output the result in folder. Warning : this interface is not maintained anymore and may not work correctly. Proposed algorithms are:

• fca
• aoc-poset (hermes and ares are proposed)
• iceberg fca (from iceberg90, iceberg60... to iceberg90. icebergXX will generate only the concept which extent are equal or more than XX% of the total number of object in the context)

Output files:

• a dot file for every concept poset generated
• a svg file for every concept poset family generated (optional)
• a tex file for every object-attribute context generated at each step (optional)
• a xml file containing all the lattices and transient contexts. (optional)
• a trace file to sum up the choice of each step

Non Interactive concept generator

commandline :

java -jar rcaexplore.jar auto  [--follow-path=] [--output-svg] [--output-tex] [--output-xml]

Concepts browser

commandline :

java -jar rcaexplore.jar browser 

To see the content of a concept, chose a step, a context and type the name of the concept then click update. Concepts names of a selected context are display with their support between parenthesis. It is possible to filter this list to obtain only concepts of a minimal support. From a concept are available its parents, its children, its extent, its intent and its simplified intent. If an element of the simplified intent and an element of the intent are selected, a representation of the corresponding rule is displayed on the lower part of the window.

The Editor

To do

Exploration

To do