Preface


Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is a mathematically well-founded theory aimed
at data analysis and classification, introduced and detailed in the book of Bern-
hard Ganter and Rudolf Wille, “Formal Concept Analysis”, Springer 1999. The
area came into being in the early 1980s and has since then spawned over 10000
scientific publications and a variety of practically deployed tools. FCA allows
one to build from a data table with objects in rows and attributes in columns
a taxonomic data structure called concept lattice, which can be used for many
purposes, especially for Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval.
    The “Formal Concept Analysis Meets Information Retrieval” (FCAIR) work-
shop collocated with the 35th European Conference on Information Retrieval
(ECIR 2013) was intended, on the one hand, to attract researchers from FCA
community to a broad discussion of FCA-based research on information retrieval,
and, on the other hand, to promote ideas, models, and methods of FCA in the
community of Information Retrieval.
    This volume contains 11 contributions to FCAIR workshop (including 3 ab-
stracts for invited talks and tutorial) held in Moscow, on March 24, 2013. All
submissions were assessed by at least two reviewers from the program committee
of the workshop to which we express our gratitude. We would also like to thank
the co-organizers and sponsors of the FCAIR workshop: Russian Foundation for
Basic Research, National Research University Higher School of Economics, and
Yandex.


March 24, 2013                                                Claudio Carpineto
                                                            Sergei O. Kuznetsov
                                                                 Amedeo Napoli