FcAWN: Concept Analysis as a Formal Method for Automated Web-Menu Design

Web-menu is one of the most important and widely used modalities in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The design and con- struction of navigation menus for websites, however, have traditionally been left to the intuition of a web developer. This paper proposes the use of a mathematical theory called Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) (5,9,14,16,17) to assist in the design and automatic generation of a navigation hierarchy for a set of web documents. We demonstrate how multi-layered menu models can be devised and automatically generated by an adaptation and application of the principle of FCA and its asso- ciated algorithms. Our approach, FcAWN (pronounced fawn) - Formal concepts Applied to Web Navigation - reveals a fundamental difference between existing web-menu layouts and the ones generated using FCA: many of today's web-menu hierarchies are tree structures in which sub- menus do not overlap, while menu-hierarchies obtained using FCA are part of a lattice structure in which sub-menus are not required to be mutually exclusive. FcAWN is one of the few semi-automated web-menu design methods with which one can construct consistent and logical menu hierarchies for web navigation.