Applying formal concepts analysis to the construction and evolution of domain frameworks

Framework development is a hard process. Hardness increases when dealing with domain frameworks, which should be quickly adapted to the changing requirements of the business areas they model. We show a development process especially designed for this kind of frameworks. Thanks to the formal support provided by some techniques, based on formal concepts analysis, and thanks to the set of tools that implement them, the process provide an automatic support for the construction of domain frameworks. Taking this process (of domain frameworks construction) as starting point, we propose the generalization of the employed techniques to support the whole framework life cycle. The different phases of the proposed process are analyzed with detail, making special emphasis in their automatic aspects. A tool in experimental phase is also described. Then, some results of using the tool for the analysis of a class library, are presented as case study.