Temporal Concept Analysis

This paper introduces Temporal Concept Analysis (TCA) as the theory of temporal phenomena described with tools of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). The basic notion in TCA is that of a Conceptual Time System introduced by the author [42,45] such that state spaces and phase spaces can be defined as concept lattices which clearly represent the meaning of states with respect to the chosen time description. In this paper two closely related types of conceptual time systems are introduced, namely 'conceptual time systems with parts' and 'conceptual time systems with actual objects'. The latter yields a generalization of classical systems with many similar subsystems or particles. Some industrial and scientific applications of conceptual movies of subsystems (particles) are presented.