Applying Formal Concept Analysis to assist class hierarchy construction in biomedical systems

The class hierarchy is one of the most important activities of the object-oriented software development. The class design and its hierarchy is a difficult task especially when what is sought is an extensive and complex modeling. An inaccurate or incomplete class hierarchy entails manufacturing defects of the software, making it difficult to maintain or make corrections. The software design in areas like bioinformatics, systems biology and medical informatics usually requires of the designer expertise in biology and medicine, which makes it even more difficult to model class structures. This paper provides guidance for class hierarchy generation which can also be applied to database schema. The use of Formal Concept Analysis provides a theory which enables troubleshoot hierarchy of classes to accomplish the maximum factoring of classes while preserving the relationships of specialization.