Concept Analysis as a Formal Method for Menu Design

Abstract. The design and construction of navigation menus for websites have traditionally been performed manually according to the intuition of a web developer. This paper introduces a new approach, FcAWN (pronounced “fawn”) – Formal concept Analysis for Web Navigation – to assist in the design and generation of a coherent and logical navigation hierarchy for a set of web documents. We provide an algorithmic process for generating multi-layered menu models using FcAWN and demonstrate its feasibility with an experimental case study. Our study reveals a fundamental difference between the traditional tree-based menu structure and the lattice-based menu structure by FcAWN: a FcAWN-generated lattice structure is more general than a tree structure and yet is mathematically sound and uniquely suited for menu design and construction. FcAWN is the first mathematical principle for menu design and generation, providing a practical basis for human-computer interaction.