Dual Retrieval in Conceptual Information Systems

Abstract

Abstract. Conceptual Information Systems provide a multi-dimensional conceptually structured view on data stored in relational databases. On restricting the expressiveness of the retrieval language, they allow the visualization of sets of related queries in conceptual hierarchies, hence supporting the search of something one does not have a precise descrip-tion, but only a vague idea of. Information Retrieval is considered as the process of nding specic ob-jects (documents etc.) out of a large set of objects which t to some description. In some data analysis and knowledge discovery applications, the dual task is of interest: The analyst needs to determine, for a subset of objects, a description for this subset. In this paper we discuss how Conceptual Information Systems can be extended to support also the second task.