Precalculating Component Interface Compatibility using FCA

In component-based software engineering, software systems are built by assembling prefabricated reusable components. The compat- ibility between the assembled components is crucial. It is determined by the comparison of their exposed interfaces: required interfaces (describ- ing the services the component needs) and provided interfaces (describing the services the other component offers) must match. Given a compo- nent, finding a compatible component in a component repository is not trivial. The idea of this paper is that organizing component directories with a yellow-page-like structure makes the search for suitable compo- nents more efficient. We propose a solution based on Formal Concept Analysis to precalculate a concept lattice to organize our components. It proves to be an efficient solution to both represent the component com- patibility information and provide a browsable component organization to support the component search mechanism.

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