Formal concept analysis in relational contexts

Formal concept analysis (FCA) is a method mainly used for the analysis of data, which identifies conceptual structures among data sets. Central to FCA is the notion of formal context. A formal context is usually defined as a binary relation between a set of objects and a set of attributes. But in real world, it is more meaningful to consider the direct relations between objects (or individuals). In this paper, in order to model those relations between individuals in real world, we shall propose a different kind of context - relational context for FCA, which contains a universe U of objects and a binary relation r on U. The definitions of relational concepts in relational contexts and the basic properties about relational contexts and relational concepts are also given.