Power contexts and their concept lattices

We introduce a framework for the study of formal contexts and their lattices induced by the additional structure of self-relations on top of the traditional incidence relation. The induced contexts use subsets as objects and attributes, hence the name power context and power concept. Six types of new incidence relations are introduced by taking into account all possible combinations of universal and existential quantifiers as well as the order of the quantifications in constructing the lifted power contexts. The structure of the power concept lattice is investigated through projection mappings from the baseline objects and attributes to those of the power context, respectively. We introduce the notions of extensional consistency and intensional consistency, corresponding to the topological notions of continuity in the analogous setting when concepts are viewed as closed sets. We establish Galois connections for these notions of consistency. We further introduce the notion of faithfulness for the first type of lifted incidence relation based on the fact that it can be equivalently characterized by a concept-faithful morphism. We also present conditions under which the power concept lattice serves as a factor lattice of the base concept lattice. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.