Projects available for PhD/Honours

Modern software development approaches often rely on a technology called refactoring: enhancing the quality of software by changing the code into better designs without actually adding functionality, typically in small steps. One of the main questions that arise in this context are finding the parts of the software that have to be refactored and how. This project shall try to use a data analysis technique called Formal Concept Analysis to answer these questions.

XML is used not only for storing information, but also for processing it using technologies like e.g. XSLT. Though available technologies are already quite powerful, a higher level model for modelling information flows is still lacking.

This project involves creating a front end for presenting a visual representation of information stored within a "triple store". The presentation is conditioned by (i) meta-data attached to the information, (ii) the context of the user, and (iii) the logical structure of the data. Presentation forms include indented lists and tables, and line diagrams of concept lattices.

Formal Concept Analysis has a tradition of being used as analysis tool for relational database systems. It gives a quite different view on the data compared to classical, numerical and statistical analysis techniques. Usually it is used independent of those classical techniques, but more modern developments like ToscanaJ allow combining both, which should be investigated in this project.