Supporting concept assignment in the comprehension of Web applications

An approach providing automatic support in the assignment of concepts to documents recovered by reverse engineering Web applications is presented. Web pages composing Web applications usually include relevant textual information from the domain of the application, while different editing formats are used for emphasising to the end users the various concepts provided by the pages. The proposed concept assignment approach exploits both the textual information contained in the Web pages, and the editing formal used to display it in order to identify automatically a set of candidate concepts describing a Web page or a set of pages. These concepts can be used by maintainers involved in the task of assigning a meaning to software artefacts recovered by reverse engineering the Web applications. Validation experiments carried out with Web applications selected from the real world showed the validity of the proposed approach. The experimental results are presented in the paper.