Concept Analysis — a New Framework for Program Understanding

Concept analysis transforms any relation between ‘lob-jects ” 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 technol-ogy, 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.