Evaluation of Concept Lattices in a Web-Based Mail Browser

Concept lattices assist human understanding in three ways: firstly, by collecting formal concepts that contain maximal sets of objects with shared attributes; secondly, the relatedness of concepts is revealed by providing a hierarchy of formal concepts in the information space. Finally, the concept lattice (drawn as a line diagram) reveals inferences that can automatically derive association rules. Therefore, a major hypothesis of the application of concept lattices is that they visually assist in understanding the structure of information contained within an information space. However, there has been little in the way of empirical tests to substantiate this hypothesis. This paper describes the process and results of a usability evaluation for a program called Mail-Strainer, a Web-based variant of the Mail-Sleuth program, which in turn is based on the Conceptual Email Manager (Cem).

[1]  Claudio Carpineto,et al.  A lattice conceptual clustering system and its application to browsing retrieval , 2004, Machine Learning.

[2]  Claudio Carpineto,et al.  Concept data analysis - theory and applications , 2004 .

[3]  Claudio Carpineto,et al.  Information retrieval through hybrid navigation of lattice representations , 1996, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[4]  Gerd Stumme,et al.  CEM-Visualisation and Discovery in Email , 2000, PKDD.

[5]  Peter W. Eklund,et al.  Concept Lattices for Information Visualization: Can Novices Read Line-Diagrams? , 2004, ICFCA.

[6]  Peter W. Eklund,et al.  Scalability in Formal Concept Analysis , 1999, Comput. Intell..

[7]  Rokia Missaoui,et al.  Experimental Comparison of Navigation in a Galois Lattice with Conventional Information Retrieval Methods , 1993, Int. J. Man Mach. Stud..

[8]  Peter W. Eklund,et al.  Analyzing an Email Collection Using Formal Concept Analysis , 1999, PKDD.

[9]  Jan Komorowski,et al.  Principles of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery , 2001, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[10]  Gerd Stumme,et al.  CEM - A program for visualisation and discovery in email , 2000, KDD 2000.

[11]  Mary Corbett,et al.  Effective Methodology for the Study of HCI , 1990 .

[12]  Gerd Stumme,et al.  Document Retrieval for Email Search and Discovery using Formal Concept Analysis , 2002 .

[13]  Peter W. Eklund,et al.  Restructuring Help Systems Using Formal Concept Analysis , 2005, ICFCA.

[14]  Gerd Stumme,et al.  Document retrieval for e-mail search and discovery using formal concept analysis , 2003, Appl. Artif. Intell..