Formal Concept Analysis
of
Procedure Call Relations
Christopher Taylor
Formal Concept Analysis
• Foundations
– notion of “concept” in logic(19th Century)
– Lattice Theory (~1940’s)
• Introduced by Rudolf Wille (1979)
• A discrete technique for data analysis and
knowledge processing
– more suited to problems in our discipline (until
law of large numbers takes over)?
Example
Quantum Scheme Interpreter
Finite Automaton Simulator
Future Work
•
•
•
•
Analyze larger systems (tool limitation)
Compare more systems with similar structure
Automate the concept lattice generation
Analyze some of the deeper lattice properties
– what do they tell us about the system structure
• Compare concept analysis to other methods
• Can knowledge extraction be automated?
Related Work
• Assessing Modular Structure of Legacy Code
(Christian Lindig and Gregor Snelting)
– tried to find module in old systems
• Software Reengineering (Gregor Snelting)
– further work on modularizing legacy code
• All anaylsis is done by manual inspection of
generated lattice (if you can’t see it ...)
References
• Formal Concept Analysis: Mathematical
Foundations. Bernhard Ganter and Rudolf Wille.
Springer-Verlag 1999
• Software Reengineering Based on Concept Lattices.
Gregor Snelting. ICSE 2000
• Assessing Modular Structure of Legacy Code Based
on Mathematical Concept Analysis.
Christian
Linding and Gregor Snelting. ICSE 1997