COSS: Comprehension by ontologising software system

Ontology has been investigated in the context of knowledge representation among heterogeneous and disparate knowledge base systems. Our study and experiments suggest that ontology also has a great potential for program comprehension. The main idea is to extract the ontological perspective of existing software system, which is a combination of two kinds of ontology: domain ontology and source code ontology. Domain ontology is domain vocabulary which is built by domain experts, while source code ontology is automatically populated from source code, which represents the knowledge in the existing software. Combining these two ontologies will generate a third ontology, application specific ontology, which is used in program comprehension.