COSS: Comprehension by ontologising software system

Author

Zhou, Hong

Author_Institution

Software Technol. Res. Lab., De Montfort Univ., Leicester

fYear

2008

fDate

Sept. 28 2008-Oct. 4 2008

Firstpage

432

Lastpage

435

Abstract

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.

Keywords

ontologies (artificial intelligence); reverse engineering; software maintenance; comprehension by ontologising software system; domain ontology; domain vocabulary; knowledge base systems; knowledge representation; program comprehension; software maintenance; source code ontology; Application software; Automation; Costs; Documentation; Knowledge representation; Ontologies; Programming profession; Software maintenance; Software systems; Vocabulary; Concepts; Domain knowledge; Program Comprehension; Properties; Relations; Source Code;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Software Maintenance, 2008. ICSM 2008. IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Beijing

ISSN

1063-6773

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-2613-3

Electronic_ISBN

1063-6773

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICSM.2008.4658097

Filename

4658097