Lattice-Based Decomposition of Transitive Homogeneous Class Hierarchies*

The decomposition of conceptual hierarchies is a significant task in knowledge engineering and software engineering, allowing the extraction of hidden or non-obvious knowledge pieces, or software subsystems, and the relations between them. During the last decades, many different approaches to the analysis and decomposition of conceptual hierarchies were developed, however, most of them do not pay enough attention to the semantic consistency of the decomposition, considering the internal semantic dependencies between the class attributes. Consequently, extracted knowledge items and software subsystems, can be semantically inconsistent due to the contradiction with such dependencies and model unrealistic or impossible entities or subsystems within a particular domain. Therefore, we propose a new approach to conceptual hierarchy decomposition based on the internal semantic dependencies between the properties and methods of the hierarchy members. Implementing the approach, an appropriate algorithm was developed for the decomposition of class hierarchies within the object-oriented dynamic networks, that constructs only semantically consistent subclasses and sub hierarchies. To demonstrate the main scenarios of algorithm application, we provided a comprehensive example of the decomposition of conceptual hierarchy, consisting of homogeneous classes of objects.