Career
His most celebrated work is the invention of Formal concept analysis, a unsupervised machine learning technique that applies mathematical lattice theory to organize data based on objects and their shared attributes. Now officially retired, Wille continues to play an active leadership role in the concept lattice research community. From 1983, he has been leader of the research group on Formal concept analysis and since 1993 Chairman of the "Ernst Schröder Center for Conceptual Knowledge Engineering".
Wille"s research interests include algebra, order and lattice theory, foundations of geometry, discrete mathematics, measurement theory, mathematics in music, philosophy of science, conceptual knowledge engineering and contextual logic.
A significant international community of researchers follow Wille"s work on Formal concept analysis, the main forums being the International Conferences on Formal Concept Analysis (ICFCA), Conceptual Structures (see also Conceptual graphs) (ICCS) and Concept Lattices and their Application (College Language Association) conferences. The first two are published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science and the latter is a multi-stage conference that produces journal papers.
A leader, inter-disciplinarian, peace activist and prolific mentor, Wille has overseen more than 100 German "Diplomund Staatsexamenarbeiten" in Mathematics, 51 Doctor of Philosophy dissertations, and 8 Postdoctoral "habilitation" qualifications.