Concept Analysis - A New Framework for Program Understanding

Concept analysis transforms any relation between ‘lobjects” and “attributes” into a complete lattice. This concept lattice can be studied by algebraic means and offers remarkable insight into properties and structure of the original relation. As relations between “objects” and “at,t,ributcs” occur all the time in software technology, concept analysis is an attractive foundat,ion for a new class of program analysis tools. The article presents a short overview of the underlying theory, as well as applications for software component retrieval, analysis of configuration spaces, and modularization of legacy code. 1 Overview Concept analysis provides a way to identify groupings of objects that, have common attributes. The mathematical foundation was laid by G. Birkhoff in 1940 [l]. Birkhoff proved that for every binary relation between certain “objects” and “attributes”, a. lattice can be constructed which allows remarkable insight into the structure of the original ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: PASTE
• Authors: Gregor Snelting
• Keywords: Concept Analysis, Original Relation, PASTE 1998, Remarkable Insight, Software Engineering