Abstract

Software maintainers routinely have to deal with a multitude of artifacts, like source code or documents, which often end up disconnected, due to their different representations and the size and complexity of legacy systems. One of the main challenges in software maintenance is to establish and maintain the semantic connections among all the different artifacts. In this paper, we show how Semantic Web technologies can deliver a unified representation to explore, query and reason about a multitude of software artifacts. A novel feature is the automatic integration of two important types of software maintenance artifacts, source code and documents, by populating their corresponding sub-ontologies through code analysis and text mining. We demonstrate how the resulting "Software Semantic Web" can support typical maintenance tasks through ontology queries and DL reasoning, such as security analysis, architectural evolution, and traceability recovery between code and documents.

Keywords: Software Maintenance, Ontology Population, Text Mining.

Reference

René Witte, Yonggang Zhang, and Juergen Rilling. Empowering Software Maintainers with Semantic Web Technologies. 4th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2007), June 3-7, 2007, Innsbruck, Austria. Springer LNCS 4519, pp.37-52.

Bibtex entry (also for download):

@InProceedings{WZR_ESWC2007,
  author = 	 {Ren{\'{e}} Witte and Yonggang Zhang and Juergen Rilling},
  title = 	 {{Empowering Software Maintainers with Semantic Web Technologies}},
  booktitle =	 {4th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2007)},
  pages =	 {37--52},
  year =	 {2007},
  editor =	 {E. Franconi and M. Kifer and W. May},
  number =	 {4519},
  series =	 {LNCS},
  address =	 {Innsbruck, Austria},
  month =	 {June 3--7},
  publisher =	 {Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg},
  note =         {\url{http://www.eswc2007.org/pdf/eswc07-witte.pdf}}
}

You can also:

• Visit the conference website
• Visit the official version of this paper at SpringerLink
• Visit the electronic version of LNCS volume 4519
• Visit the ontoworld.org Wiki page for this paper
• Search for conference photos on Flickr, where you'll also find this photo of yours truly (right) talking with Wolfgang May.

This paper received the best paper award. ESWC 2007 had 270 submitted papers and an acceptance rate of 17%.

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