XML design: An FCA point of view

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) documents are the main format for publishing and interchanging data on the Web. Integrity constraints are essential in data design. Functional dependencies are the most important semantic constraints. Functional dependencies satisfied by XML data have been introduced recently. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is a mathematical theory of concept hierarchies which is based on Lattice Theory. Data is represented as a two-dimensional context of objects and attributes. FCA discovers dependencies within the data based on the relation among objects and attributes. In this paper we take a first step towards using an FCA approach to study functional dependencies in XML databases. The novelty of our approach is the software, which analyzes an XML document, constructs the Formal Context corresponding to the flat representation of the XML data and finds the implications, which are functional dependencies in XML data.