Title :
Extracting ontologies from legacy systems for understanding and re-engineering
Author :
Yang, Hongji ; Cui, Zhan ; O´Brien, Paul
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci., De Montfort Univ., Leicester, UK
Abstract :
Ontology has been investigated in the context of knowledge sharing among heterogeneous and disparate database and knowledge base systems. Our recent study and experiments suggest that ontology also have a great potential for legacy software understanding and re-engineering. In this paper we consider an ontology to be composed of four elements: classes, relations, functions and instances. We show these four elements forming an ontology for a legacy system can be extracted from the code of the concerned system using the existing software re-engineering tools. We then present our vision how the obtained ontology can be applied to understanding and eventually better re-engineering the legacy systems
Keywords :
distributed databases; knowledge based systems; reverse engineering; software maintenance; software tools; systems re-engineering; classes; functions; heterogeneous database systems; heterogeneous knowledge base systems; instances; knowledge sharing; legacy software reengineering; legacy software understanding; ontology; relations; software re-engineering tools; Business communication; Companies; Computer science; Context; Data mining; Deductive databases; Information systems; Intelligent systems; Ontologies; Software tools;
Conference_Titel :
Computer Software and Applications Conference, 1999. COMPSAC '99. Proceedings. The Twenty-Third Annual International
Conference_Location :
Phoenix, AZ
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-0368-3
DOI :
10.1109/CMPSAC.1999.812512
