Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Concept algebra


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   keep. Valley2 city ‽ 20:23, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Concept algebra

 * ( [ delete] ) – (View AfD) (View log)

Neologism. Only sources I could find are Wikipedia mirrors, blogs, and books by the originator of the concept. Originating editor's sole contributions are to this article, the prodded Logic thinking automation, and redirects to the latter (both articles are concepts originated by Shilong Wu). Contested prod; I brought it here when someone tried to reinstate the prod. B.Wind (talk) 23:50, 8 March 2009 (UTC) WillOakland (talk) 17:43, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete as original research. WillOakland (talk) 05:24, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
 * If there is a "concept algebra" other than what's described here, I see no harm in deleting this article anyway until someone is prepared to write something verifiable. WillOakland (talk) 07:47, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete as per above arguments. Akerbeltz (talk) 10:42, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
 * If we're heading for "keep" then we ought to cut the current impregnable article down to a one-sentence stub that states what concept algebra is. So the topic may be notable after all but no matter how many times I read it, the current format leaves me none the wiser and we have no way of getting at the source of this bad translation. Akerbeltz (talk) 23:32, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I'll agree that the current article leaves a LOT to be desired. -- Whpq (talk) 02:19, 10 March 2009 (UTC)


 * There are appear to be several, but related definitions of concept algebra in the literature. It's unclear if this stuff by Shilong Wu has anything to do with it, but the Wu stuff appears to be OR.


 * In terms of cleanup, the whole article should have its entire content replaced with one of the definitions in the literature. One I found (which may not be the most known or useful) is that of a concept lattice with a weak negation and opposition.  --C S (talk) 04:05, 10 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep - It appears that "Concept Algebra" is a topic of mathematics and computer science that has relevancy to software engineering. Examples:, , , .  The article could stand some drastic improvement but concept algebra appears to be a bona fide topic. -- Whpq (talk) 15:45, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
 * While the third reference cited above mentions the term trivially, the first and the fourth look promising if they are actually incorporated into the article. Frankly, it still might be best to scrape this article clean and start anew but using reliable sources that actually give more than a nominal mention of the topic. B.Wind (talk) 04:03, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep per above and the paper here on IEEE page. Also has a google group. BigDunc  Talk 22:59, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Note the paper was co-authored by Shilong Wu. Note also that the "host" of the Google Group is named Shilong Wu. Neither is a reliable source independent of the topic of the article or the originator of the topic. B.Wind (talk) 03:52, 10 March 2009 (UTC) Retracting first statement as I had misread the names of the authors of the paper. B.Wind (talk) 04:39, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
 * On what basis do you say Wu is a co-author? Not listed as one.  Even if s/he were, we don't generally require that a published reference in a peer-reviewed publication (not that I'm saying this is one such, hard to tell) not have the originator of a concept as an author.  The fact of publication by an independent peer review is sufficient.  --C S (talk) 04:09, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Retracted per above. Note the requirements of WP:V, WP:N, and WP:RS for Wikipedia inclusion for articles. B.Wind (talk) 04:39, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment My initial suspicion was that this is related to the idea of a concept lattice. I haven't investigated further. Michael Hardy (talk) 02:37, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep I Googled it, and looked through the first two pages of results. Some of those seem to be legitimate scientific sites.  The article needs some improvement, and proper references of course, but no reason to delete it.   D r e a m Focus  11:02, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment viz Michael Hardy + Akerbeltz, concept algebras do appear to be sub-classes of concept lattices, it would be nice to find a formal definition somewhere in the literature but I have failed so far. What this article mainly needs is rewriting and referencing.  pablo hablo. 12:54, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep You should really look through google scholar before nominating a mathematical concept for deletion. This might not turn up in the New York Times, but it's well talked about in academic journals., , and  appear to be valid sources.  As for implementation, well I'm not a mathematician so I'd tag this article as being in need of an expert or perhaps go to the relevant Wikiproject. Themfromspace (talk) 20:17, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
 * The reason concept algebra got nominated for deletion is because the user in question created two pages, concept algebra and Logic thinking automation, both fairly incomprehensible and because an (admittedly) casual review of what Google threw up didn't seem to point to anything that the language in the article matched to apart from the author's stuff. So nominating both for deletion was not an unfounded step. But given the discussion, I agree that keeping concept algebra makes sense but only if we can at least find a one-liner that defines the subject. Because as it stands, it's about as informative as an Ikea leaflet. Akerbeltz (talk) 20:46, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

*Delete, with no prejudice to rewrite a new article on completely different bases. The present article is pretty useless, as it gives just generic technobabble about "thinking" and "reasoning" and "calculation", and no definitions or examples or precise statements. Moreover, as can be seen in at least one of the above cited books, the concept of a "concept algebra" (no pun) predates "the beginning of 21st century", if both refer to the same subject; if not, we have no way of saying whether any of the texts cited has anything to do with the present subject. Finally, saying that a concept algebra is not a Boolean algebra is quite unhelpful, as we have not been told what it is. Goochelaar (talk) 20:52, 12 March 2009 (UTC) Keep after Hans Adler's rewriting. Thanks, Hans! Goochelaar (talk) 00:30, 13 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Comment: A mathscinet search turns up the following references to "concept algebra":

MR0641266 (83i:68106) Gergely, T. Algebraic representation of language hierarchies. Acta Cybernet. 5 (1980/81), no. 3, 307--323.

MR1203147 (93k:68062) Dionne, Robert; Mays, Eric; Oles, Frank J. A non-well-founded approach to terminological cycles. AAAI-92. Proceedings, Tenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (San Jose, CA, 1992), 761--766, Amer. Assoc. Artif. Intell., Menlo Park, CA, 1992.

MR2136468 (2006a:06006) Kwuida, Léonard Congruences of concept algebras. Novi Sad J. Math. 34 (2004),  no. 2, 141--152.

MR2308909 (2008a:03120) Ganter, Bernhard; Kwuida, Léonard Finite distributive concept algebras. Order 23  (2006),  no. 2-3, 235--248.

Also many of the references listed above (in computer science / engineering journals that are not listed on mathscinet) appear to be legitimate. From this I conclude:

1) There is a sufficiently well-established notion of concept algebra in the literature to merit a wikipedia article. (I believe that Michael Hardy is correct that the, er, concept, is related to concept lattices.) It should be possible to track down one or more of these references and write a short article giving at least the definition of a concept algebra.

2) The claim that "concept algebra" was invented by Shilong Wu in the 21st century is at best misleading, since documented instances of the term go back at least to 1980/1981.

Now an opinion: the current article is worthless. It has neither informative content nor reputable source material (a link to a blog is certainly not sufficient). It is not even possible to tell from the current article whether Shilong Wu's use of the term "concept algebra" is compatible with the published literature in this area. (There are no mathscinet publications for Shilong Wu. Are there any other academic publications by him/her?) It would seem appropriate that the article be rewritten completely so as to pertain to the version of "concept algebra" appearing in the literature, but before doing so it would be nice to know if there is in fact any connection between the two notions. Plclark (talk) 22:16, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Comment The Google Scholar search mentioned above shows a few good sources about the topic.   I learned from them that concept algebras were defined by Rudolf Wille, the founder of formal concept analysis, in a paper that appeared in 2000. This appears to be very solid and reasonable mathematics in the area between mathematical logic and computer science. Any uses of "concept algebra" before 2000 refer to different definitions. I believe the one by Wille is the correct one to have an article about.
 * The present article, however, is based on a very dubious blog by one Shilong Wu who has trouble expressing themselves in English and who also writes about "Einstein’s Four Hypothesizes of Relativity Calculated By Concept Calculator". For all intents and purposes this blog is indistinguishable from pseudomathematics. – The two concepts do not only share a name, they are also remarkably similar. However, as is often the case with pseudomathematics, it seems impossible to find out what the definition of Wu's notion is. Note that Wu also calls it "General Wu[!] algebra".
 * We could simply redirect this article to formal concept analysis and treat the topic there in a single paragraph. But as it fits my professional interests pretty well I am going to rewrite the article instead. --Hans Adler (talk) 22:35, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Looks good to me, I'm happy for the deletion tag to be removed now. Cheers Adler! Akerbeltz (talk) 23:00, 12 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep I have rewritten the article so that only the title remains of the original version. It is no longer fringe or OR now. The subject is clearly notable, with a lot of recent research activity. I have removed the expert and cleanup tags, which no longer apply. --Hans Adler (talk) 00:20, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Weak keep after Adler's rewrite. It's not obvious from the current contents why this is sufficiently distinct from formal concept analysis to have a separate article rather than being part of the same article, but at least it's now a topic of mainstream published research. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:13, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
 * As you have probably seen, the relation is analogous to that between ring (mathematics) and group theory, except it's of course much less notable. Doesn't weak keep mean you are not sure whether it should be deleted anyway? (As in: not merged.) If that's what you meant, I would like to know why. --Hans Adler (talk) 18:41, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
 * week keep/redirect Formal concept analysis the new version. --Salix (talk): 08:55, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Redirect as there is already an article about the encyclopedic concept and people can't be bothered to understand the difference. WillOakland (talk) 17:44, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
 * That's rude after someone has rewritten the article. --Hans Adler (talk) 18:41, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep - now has a definition and references, HUGE improvement on the amorphous blob that gave rise to the Afd, well done Hans Adler. actually a 'blob' can't really be amorphous I suppose, what with being blob-shaped. pablo hablo. 18:58, 13 March 2009 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.