A Categorical View on Algebraic Lattices in Formal Concept Analysis

Formal concept analysis has grown from a new branch of the mathematical field of lattice theory to a widely recognized tool in Computer Science and elsewhere. In order to fully benefit from this theory, we believe that it can be enriched with notions such as approximation by computation or representability. The latter are commonly studied in denotational semantics and domain theory and captured most prominently by the notion of algebraicity, e.g. of lattices. In this paper, we explore the notion of algebraicity in formal concept analysis from a category-theoretical perspective. To this end, we build on the the notion of approximable concept with a suitable category and show that the latter is equivalent to the category of algebraic lattices. At the same time, the paper provides a relatively comprehensive account of the representation theory of algebraic lattices in the framework of Stone duality, relating well-known structures such as Scott information systems with further formalisms from logic, topology, domains and lattice theory.Comment: 36 page

A Few Notes on Formal Balls

Using the notion of formal ball, we present a few new results in the theory of quasi-metric spaces. With no specific order: every continuous Yoneda-complete quasi-metric space is sober and convergence Choquet-complete hence Baire in its $d$-Scott topology; for standard quasi-metric spaces, algebraicity is equivalent to having enough center points; on a standard quasi-metric space, every lower semicontinuous $\bar{\mathbb{R}}_+$-valued function is the supremum of a chain of Lipschitz Yoneda-continuous maps; the continuous Yoneda-complete quasi-metric spaces are exactly the retracts of algebraic Yoneda-complete quasi-metric spaces; every continuous Yoneda-complete quasi-metric space has a so-called quasi-ideal model, generalizing a construction due to K. Martin. The point is that all those results reduce to domain-theoretic constructions on posets of formal balls