An Ontology-Based Approach to Reengineering Enterprise Software for Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the future trend for enterprise software solutions, which means a lot of legacy systems will need to be either adapted to fit the requirement of cloud computing or to be purged and redesigned from scratch. However, enterprise software is far too complex for any human being to understand as a whole. This paper proposes a novel approach to reengineering enterprise software for cloud computing by building an ontology for enterprise software and then partitioning the enterprise software ontology to decompose enterprise software into potential service candidates. Ontology development process includes three steps, namely, building ontologies for source code, data, and application framework respectively, integrating captured ontologies and deploying the final produced ontology. Firstly, the ontology development process is supported by the reverse engineering and model transformation techniques. Secondly, the ontology integration is based on ontology engineering research. Thirdly, the deployment of enterprise software ontology is done through the software reengineering activities. Once the ontology is built, there will be a link between ontology and enterprise software. By analysing the concepts and relations in ontology, the enterprise software will be understood and decomposed as different service candidates.