Monoidal Categories for Formal Concept Analysis

Abstract: We investigate monoidal categories of formal contexts, in which states correspond to formal concepts. In particular we examine the category of bonds or Chu correspondences between contexts, which is known to be equivalent to the *-autonomous category of complete sup-lattices. We show that a second monoidal structure exists on both categories, corresponding to the direct product of formal contexts defined by Ganter and Wille, and discuss the use of these categories as compositional models of meaning.