Concept Analysis - A New Framework for Program Understanding

Concept analysis transforms any relation between "objects" 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 "attributes" occur all the time in software technology, concept analysis is an attractive foundation 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.