This volume collects the proceedings of two related international conferences on
foundations and practical applications of mathematical methods of data analysis,
of Formal Concept Analysis and of methods for information extraction from
natural language texts. The first conference, named Knowledge - Ontology -
Theory 2007 (KONT 2007), was held during September 14–16, 2007 in Novosibirsk
(Russia) at the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics in cooperation with the
Russian Foundation for Basic Research and the Association for Pattern Recognition
and Image Analysis of the Russian Federation. The second conference, the
International Conference on Knowledge Processing in Practice (KPP 2007), was
held during September 28–30, 2007 in Darmstadt (Germany) at the University of
Applied Sciences in cooperation with the Ernst Schr¨oder Center for Conceptual
Knowledge Processing and the Darmstadt University of Technology.
The aim of both conferences was to bring together practitioners and
researchers in the interdisciplinary field of mathematical and concept-based
knowledge processing. Knowledge processing today spans a broad spectrum of
approaches and techniques from data analysis and pattern recognition over artificial
intelligence with information retrieval and machine learning to conceptual
knowledge processing with its graphical tools for knowledge visualization. From
a lifecycle perspective, the field of knowledge processing covers the following
main stages: data collection and pre-processing, discovery of regularities, creation
of subject domain theories, application of formal knowledge structures,
formal reasoning and interpretation in the application domain.
At both conferences, particular emphasis was placed on the technology and
experience transfer aspects between practitioners and academic researchers in order
to foster mutual learning and application-oriented research and development
in the area of knowledge processing based on real empirical needs.
The contributions were all refereed and the accepted papers are collected in
this volume. They cover four main focus areas which should, however, not be
understood as mutually exclusive. Rather, all contributions share the common
foundation that conceptual structures are essential to semantically meaningful
and valid representation and processing of formal knowledge structures. The
main focus areas are as follows: I: Applications of Conceptual Structures, II:
Concept-Based Software, III: Ontologies as Conceptual Structures and IV: Data
Analysis.