An FCA Classification of Durations of Time for Textual Databases

Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is useful in many applications, not least in data analysis. In this paper, we apply the FCA approach to the problem of classifying sets of sets of durations of time, for the purposes of storing them in a database. The database system in question is, in fact, an object-oriented text database system, in which all objects are seen as arbitrary sets of integers. These sets need to be classified in textually relevant ways in order to speed up search. We present an FCA classification of these sets of sets of durations, based on linguistically motivated criteria, and show how its results can be applied to a text database system.