Empowering Software Maintainers with Semantic Web Technologies

Abstract

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 Description Logic reasoning, such as security analysis, architectural evolution, and traceability recovery between code and documents.

Do Code and Comments Co-Evolve? On the Relation between Source Code and Comment Changes

“…However, both approaches focus on external documentation and do not investigate evolutionary aspects, i.e., they do not track documentation and source code changes together over time. Recently Witte et al used Semantic Web Technologies connect software and documentation artefacts [22]. They developed ontologies to query the linking.…”

TAGGINGSENSE: Method Based On Sensemaking For Object-Oriented Source Code Comprehension

“…Of all the activities involved in the process of maintenance, comprehension is the most important, as it is considered to be the essential basis for modifying a software product [12]. Studies show that efforts applied on maintenance are mainly targeted to the comprehension part [11].…”

Maintaining SOA Systems of the Future - How Can Ontological Modeling Help?

“…This research focused on providing ontological support for software artefacts such as source code and documentation. In work reported by Witte (2007), customized ontologies were populated automatically from source code and documentation, and then queried to provide support for source code security analysis, for traceability links between source code and documentation and for architecture analysis. In work by Hyland-Wood (2008), an ontology was developed to describe the relationship between object-oriented software components.…”