Bernhard Ganter, Rudolf Wille (1999), Springer (book; transl. C. Franzke) — DOI-10.1007/978-3-642-59830-2
Key takeaways
Filed, not read: no lawful full text was reachable (see the history note). What follows restates the book’s own preface and contents, which Springer serves freely, labelled as such.
- What it is, by its preface. Formal Concept Analysis is “a field of applied mathematics based on the mathematization of concept and conceptual hierarchy”, treated here as chiefly “a branch of applied lattice theory”. A formal context is a cross table of objects and attributes; its formal concepts, ordered by hierarchy, form the concept lattice. Many-valued contexts are reduced to that basic type by conceptual scaling.
- What it does not claim. The preface says FCA “does not strive to explain conceptual thinking”: using it on human conceptual thinking “would be an application of the mathematical method and a matter for the experts in the respective science, for example psychology”. The word “formal” is meant to delimit the theory in exactly this way.
- Contents. Order-theoretic foundations (ordered sets, complete lattices, closure operators, Galois connections); concept lattices of contexts; determining all concepts, diagrams, attribute implications; parts and factors; decompositions and constructions of concept lattices; distributivity, modularity and dimension; morphisms, bonds and scale measures.
Standing in the record
Registered on 2026-09-29 at the owner’s request, because the owner’s prior-art novelty map (a private working
document on concepts as projectors, the linear representation hypothesis and their neighbours) cites it: row 3: the FCA foundations text cited alongside Wille 2000; already cited in the owner’s docs (‘Wille/Ganter’).
It is seeded from metadata and published descriptions and has not been read here.
Only the year of first publication is known; published: uses 1 January.
Identification notes: English translation of ‘Formale Begriffsanalyse: Mathematische Grundlagen’ (Springer 1996). A 2024 second edition exists (doi 10.1007/978-3-031-63422-2) — not registered; the map names 1999.
A close reading was attempted on 2026-09-29. No legitimate full text could be reached: Checked first: the private converted-text cache (no file, no manifest entry). OpenAlex for DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-59830-2: closed (SpringerLink, subscription). Internet Archive search found no copy of the 1999 monograph (only ICFCA proceedings volumes, lending-only). A web search surfaced a PDF of the whole book on a university staff WordPress site (math.ubbcluj.ro). That is an unauthorised third-party upload and was not used. No legitimate full text was found. It stays Deferred until a copy is supplied, not on merit.
A second attempt was made on 2026-10-09, at the owner’s request, because
the manuscript bibliography of 2026-10-09 (work what-survives-translation)
considered it and dropped it from the final reference list. It again found
no lawful full text (see the version 3 history note); only the front matter
was read. The Galois-connection and closure-operator theory of its chapter
“zero” is covered, in covariant form, by Fong and Spivak’s Chapter 1, read
in NOTE-601 (LIT-803), which does not mention formal concept
analysis.