Conceptual Lattices have been extensively studied as part of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) in a variety of fields by German researchers led by the initiative of Rudolf Wille, in a seminal paper of 1982. Conceptual Lattices were based upon Lattice algebraic structures. The first papers on Modular Lattices were written by the German mathematician Richard Dedekind around 1900. These concepts were substantially developed as an abstract algebra theory by the American mathematician Garrett Birkhoff and published as a monograph in 1940.
Conceptual Lattices have appeared as an application to Software Engineering from 1990 onwards. They have been used, to analyze software specification, reengineer legacy code, perform code inspection, analyze the modularity of software systems, e.g. by Godin, Lindig, Snelting, Kuipers, Dekel, Tilley, Arévalo and Mens, among others.
Recently, Exman and Speicher have been investigating the relationships between two kinds of algebraic representations of software systems, viz. on the one hand, Modularity and Laplacian matrices, and on the other hand, Conceptual Lattices. Some interesting results have been obtained, but the subject still offers many challenging questions.
Conceptual Lattices have been also used, besides in Software Engineering, for Knowledge Processing in a variety of applications, such as bioinformatics. Here we wish in particular to emphasize diverse aspects of ontology engineering, as these raise intriguing open issues on the relationships between conceptual lattices and ontologies.
This special session, first overviews the current Conceptual Lattices research status, especially for software systems engineering. Then, it will enable open discussions of novel modern approaches to Software Theory involving Conceptual Lattices.
Researchers and practitioners working in areas relevant to Software Theory and Conceptual Lattices are invited to submit papers describing their research and experimental work, including but not restricted to the following topics:
Papers accepted by SEKE2018 must be presented at the conference by one of the authors. This is a pre-condition for your paper to be further considered for publication in a special issue in IJSEKE on LATTICE. The revised version must have about 40% additional content compared to the conference paper.