Citation Analysis using Formal Concept Analysis: A case study in Software Engineering

In this paper formal concept analysis (FCA) is used as a means to analyse afield of research using published academic papers as its input. In particular, results are presented based on a case study of 47 academic papers in a scientific field of study. The analysis includes inferences about the field of study based on the domain background knowledge derived from the ISO12207 software engineering standard. Additionally, a number of alternative classifications based on the target application language and the reported application size are introduced. FCA reveals useful insights about the nature of the subject matter: identifying fruitful areas of research as well as producing details about characteristics of the community under examination.

[1]  Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology , 1990 .

[2]  Roger S. Pressman,et al.  Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach , 1982 .

[3]  Rainer Koschke,et al.  Feature-driven program understanding using concept analysis of execution traces , 2001, Proceedings 9th International Workshop on Program Comprehension. IWPC 2001.

[4]  Thomas Ball,et al.  The concept of dynamic analysis , 1999, ESEC/FSE-7.

[5]  C. Y. K. So,et al.  Citation ranking versus expert judgment in evaluating communication scholars: Effects of research specialty size and individual prominence , 1998, Scientometrics.

[6]  Gregor Snelting,et al.  On the inference of configuration structures from source code , 1994, Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Software Engineering.

[7]  W. W. Royce,et al.  Managing the development of large software systems , 1970 .

[8]  Peter Becker,et al.  A Survey of Formal Concept Analysis Support for Software Engineering Activities , 2005, Formal Concept Analysis.

[9]  Gregor Snelting,et al.  Reengineering of configurations based on mathematical concept analysis , 1996, TSEM.

[10]  Rainer Koschke,et al.  Locating Features in Source Code , 2003, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[11]  Gregor Snelting.  Software reengineering based on concept lattices , 2000, Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering.

[12]  G. S. BraunschweigAbteilung.  Algorithms for Concept Lattice Decomposition and Their Application , 1995 .

[13]  Gregor Snelting,et al.  Concept analysis—a new framework for program understanding , 1998, PASTE '98.

[14]  Rainer Koschke,et al.  Aiding program comprehension by static and dynamic feature analysis , 2001, Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance. ICSM 2001.

[15]  Bernhard Ganter,et al.  Formal Concept Analysis: Mathematical Foundations , 1998 .

[16]  James R. Larus,et al.  Debugging temporal specifications with concept analysis , 2003, PLDI '03.

[17]  Leon Moonen,et al.  Types and concept analysis for legacy systems , 2000, Proceedings IWPC 2000. 8th International Workshop on Program Comprehension.

[18]  Dusan M. Velasevic,et al.  Reverse Engineering of Use Case Realizations in UML , 2000, SOEN.

[19]  Arie van Deursen,et al.  Identifying objects using cluster and concept analysis , 1999, Proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Software Engineering (IEEE Cat. No.99CB37002).

[20]  Gregor Snelting,et al.  Assessing Modular Structure of Legacy Code Based on Mathematical Concept Analysis , 1997, Proceedings of the (19th) International Conference on Software Engineering.