A Domain Ontology-based Program To Understand The Methods Of Research

Program Comprehension activity plays a significant role in software maintenance.However, duo to incomplete documentation for most software systems and the inborn complexity of the software systems, the program comprehension activity also takes the maintainers a lot of time and energy. Thus, how to develop methods assisting the program comprehension activity is always a hot topic in the research area of software maintenance.In this paper, program comprehension method based on domain ontology for the object-oriented source code is proposed.The meta-model of the domain ontology for program comprehension is given first. With the meta-model,domain experts can build domain ontologies to depict business semantics in the business domain.Then a interactive ontology annotation process is conducted based on the domain ontology and the result of static code analysis with the help of a maintainer.During the annotation process, based on the relation commitments for the instances in the domain ontology, maintainers'potential misunderstanding of business semantics or source code could be recognized as well as potential design defects.This annotation process results in the construction of source code knowledge base, which maintains the traceability links between the source code and domain business semantics.After the source code knowledge base is constructed, an interactive query is designed in order to help new maintainers comprehend the business semantics and the source code.The maintainers are allowed to write nature language query to inquire the knowledge base. First, nature language processing method is used to parse the syntactic structure of the query. Then, the semantic information is extracted based on the analysis of the syntactic structure.Then the query target can be located in the knowledge base.With the help of the query, the period for new maintainer to understand software system is largely shortened.