CGs to FCA Including Peirce's Cuts

Previous work has demonstrated a straightforward mapping from Conceptual Graphs (CGs) to Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), and the combined benefits these types of Conceptual Structures bring in capturing and reasoning about the semantics in system design. As in that work, a CGs Transaction Model (or `Transaction Graph') exemplar is used, but in the form of a richer Financial Trading (FT) case study that has its business rules visualised in Peirce's cuts. The FT case study highlights that cuts can meaningfully be included in the CGs to FCA mapping. Accordingly, the case study's CGs Transaction Graph with its cuts is translated into a form suitable for the CGtoFCA algorithm described in that previous work. The process is tested through the CG-FCA software that implements the CGtoFCA algorithm. The algorithm describes how a Conceptual Graph (CG), represented by triples of the form source-concept, relation, target-concept can be transformed into a set of binary relations of the form target-concept, source-conceptnrelation thus creating a formal context in FCA. Cuts though can now be included in the same formal, rigorous, reproducible and general way. The mapping develops the Transaction Graph into a Transaction Concept, capturing and unifying the features of Conceptual Structures that CGs and FCA collectively embody

Eliciting People’s Conceptual Models of Activities and Systems

People using computer systems are required to work with the concepts implemented by system developers. If there is a poor fit between system concepts and users’ pre-existing conceptualisation of domain and task, this places a high workload on the user as they translate between their own conceptualisation and that imposed by the system. The focus of this paper is on how to identify users’ conceptualisations of a domain – ideally, prior to system implementation. For this, it is necessary to gather verbal data from people that allows them to articulate their conceptual models in ways that are not overly constrained by existing devices but allows them to articulate taken-for-granted knowledge. Possible study types include semi-structured interviews, contextual inquiry interviews and think-aloud protocols. The authors discuss how to design a study, covering choosing between different kinds of study, detailed planning of questions and tasks, data gathering, and preliminary data analysis