Transparent Reverse Engineering Tool Integration Using a Conceptual Transaction Adapter

In this paper we present a proposal for a novel approach to facilitating transparent interoperability among reverse engineering tools. We characterize the architectural and operational characteristics of reverse engineering tools and demonstrate that many similarities exist among them. Taking full advantage of these similarities, we outline an approach for creating a domain ontology of operational and representational concepts for a given set of tools. A special adapter is proposed that makes use of this ontology to facilitate transparent interoperability among them