Ontological adaptive integration of reverse engineering tools

The past decade has seen an increased awareness of the challenges involved in maintaining legacy software systems. Various reverse engineering tools designed to assist maintainers in carrying out software system understanding, analysis and migration tasks have been demonstrated. While progress has been made towards increasing the performance and usefulness of these tools, most continue to exist in isolation, using proprietary formats, technologies and schemata to represent the information they extract from software artifacts.; This dissertation introduces the novel idea of using specially constructed, external tool adapters and a domain ontology to facilitate integration among reverse engineering tools. Using a constructive approach, we analyze software engineering tools, identifying the many similarities they share in terms of their architecture and the concepts they represent. Organizing these representational concepts into a domain ontology provides the knowledge required by specialized adapters to enable the sharing of services among tools participating in an integration. The design for a multi-phase methodology for sharing services among reverse engineering tools is presented. Various issues related to this service-sharing approach are explored. Our experiences in developing a proof of concept implementation based on the design and the challenges encountered are provided. We demonstrate that service-sharing among a set of reverse engineering tools can be accomplished by following our approach to ontology-based integration.