An Infrastructure to Support Interoperability in Reverse Engineering

An infrastructure that supports interoperability among reverse engineering tools and other software tools is described. The three major components of the infrastructure are: (1) a hierarchy of schemas for low- and middle-level program representation graphs, (2) g4re, a tool chain for reverse engineering C++ programs, and (3) a repository of reverse engineering artifacts, including the previous two components, a test suite, and tools, GXL instances, and XSLT transformations for graphs at each level of the hierarchy. The results of two case studies that investigated the space and time costs incurred by the infrastructure are provided. The results of two empirical evaluations that were performed using the api module of g4re, and were focused on computation of object-oriented metrics and three-dimensional visualization of class template diagrams, respectively, are also provided

An XML-based schema definition for model sharing and reuse in a distributed environment

This research leverages the inherent synergy between structured modeling and the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to facilitate model sharing and reuse in a distributed environment. This is accomplished by providing an XML-based schema definition and two alternative supporting architectures. The XML schema defines a new markup language referred to as the Structured Modeling Markup Language (SMML) for representing models. The schema is based on the structured modeling paradigm as a formalism for conceiving, representing and manipulating a wide variety of models. Overall, SMML and supporting architectures allow different types of models, developed in a variety of modeling platforms to be represented in a standardized format and shared in a distributed environment. The paper demonstrates the proposed SMML through two case studies

On semantic annotation of decision models

The growth of service sector in recent years has led to renewed research interests in the design and management of service systems. Decision support systems (DSS) play an important role in supporting this endeavor, through management of organizational resources such as models and data, thus forming the “back stage” of service systems. In this article, we identify the requirements for semantically annotating decision models and propose a model representation scheme, termed Semantically Annotated Structure Modeling Markup Language (SA-SMML) that extends Structure Modeling Markup Language (SMML) by incorporating mechanisms for linking semantic models such as ontologies that represent problem domain knowledge concepts. This model representation format is also amenable to a scalable Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for managing models in distributed environments. The proposed model representation technique leverages recent advances in the areas of semantic web, and semantic web services. Along with design considerations, we demonstrate the utility of this representation format with an illustrative usage scenarios with a particular emphasis on model discovery and composition in a distributed environment

Dagstuhl News January - December 2001

"Dagstuhl News" is a publication edited especially for the members of the Foundation "Informatikzentrum Schloss Dagstuhl" to thank them for their support. The News give a summary of the scientific work being done in Dagstuhl. Each Dagstuhl Seminar is presented by a small abstract describing the contents and scientific highlights of the seminar as well as the perspectives or challenges of the research topic

AMFIBIA: A Meta-Model for the Integration of Business Process Modelling Aspects

Today, there are many different formalisms and notations for modelling business processes. Though most of the formalisms have their justification, the plethora of notations makes it hard to compare and to exchange business process models among different tools. AMFIBIA (A Meta-model For the Integration of BusIness process modelling Aspects) sets out to capture the basic aspects of business process models and to define their concepts independently from a particular formalism and notation, and then map different formalisms to these basic concepts. This way, business process models can be compared with each other, and it will be even possible, to integrate and combine different formalisms in a single workflow engine. Currently, we implement a prototype of a workflow engine, which supports the concepts of AMFIBIA. Since the development of AMFIBIA started quite late in the history of workflow management, it might not have strong impact on existing workflow management systems. The concepts of AMFIBIA, however, should be applicable to SOA, were formalism independence is even more important. The talk presents the ideas and concepts of AMFIBIA and intends to trigger a discussion on the aspects of SOA and the aspects and concepts that need to me captured in SOA

Methodologies, tools and languages for building ontologies. Where is their meeting point?

In this paper we review and compare the main methodologies, tools and languages for building ontologies that have been reported in the literature, as well as the main relationships among them. Ontology technology is nowadays mature enough: many methodologies, tools and languages are already available. The future work in this field should be driven towards the creation of a common integrated workbench for ontology developers to facilitate ontology development, exchange, evaluation, evolution and management, to provide methodological support for these tasks, and translations to and from different ontology languages. This workbench should not be created from scratch, but instead integrating the technology components that are currently available

A service-based web portal for integrated reverse engineering and program comprehension

REportal is a web-based reverse engineering portal web site that provides developers with access to a suite of reverse engineering and program comprehension tools via a web browser. REportal was designed to simplify system maintenance by supporting the addition and upgrading of tools without involving the end user. However, the software tools and server technologies used became deprecated so quickly that it was not possible to take full advantage of the architectural vision. Using a service-oriented architecture, we abstract the process ow of the system from the underlying tools, enabling a wizard-style method of adding services to the system, and simplifying maintenance through automation.This new architecture enables easy installation, deployment, and service management from the user's perspective, and easy service addition and portal maintenance from the developer's perspective. We conducted a case study involving the addition of a legacy tool to the portal as a service, and a description of the usability bene ts of a web-based portal that integrates several features for software analysis.M.S., Computer Science -- Drexel University, 200