On-demand Relational Concept Analysis

Formal Concept Analysis and its associated conceptual structures have been used to support exploratory search through conceptual navigation. Relational Concept Analysis (RCA) is an extension of Formal Concept Analysis to process relational datasets. RCA and its multiple interconnected structures represent good candidates to support exploratory search in relational datasets, as they are enabling navigation within a structure as well as between the connected structures. However, building the entire structures does not present an efficient solution to explore a small localised area of the dataset, for instance to retrieve the closest alternatives to a given query. In these cases, generating only a concept and its neighbour concepts at each navigation step appears as a less costly alternative. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to compute a concept and its neighbourhood in extended concept lattices. The concepts are generated directly from the relational context family, and possess both formal and relational attributes. The algorithm takes into account two RCA scaling operators. We illustrate it on an example.

Towards An Architecture-Centric Approach to Manage Variability of Cloud Robotics

Cloud robotics is a field of robotics that attempts to invoke Cloud technologies such as Cloud computing, Cloud storage, and other Internet technologies centered around the benefits of converged infrastructure and shared services for robotics. In a few short years, Cloud robotics as a newly emerged field has already received much research and industrial attention. The use of the Cloud for robotics and automation brings some potential benefits largely ameliorating the performance of robotic systems. However, there are also some challenges. First of all, from the viewpoint of architecture, how to model and describe the architectures of Cloud robotic systems? How to manage the variability of Cloud robotic systems? How to maximize the reuse of their architectures? In this paper, we present an architecture approach to easily design and understand Cloud robotic systems and manage their variability.