Using domain ontologies in a dynamic analysis for program comprehension

Abstract

The use of domain knowledge for program comprehension has been advocated by many authors. However, as far as we know, most of the analysis techniques using domain knowledge are static, it seems that dynamic analyses have not yet taken full advantage of any domain knowledge. This might be a consequence of ontologies, the most common technique for domain knowledge representation, being static by nature. In this article we present a new kind of dynamic analysis that attempts to use domain knowledge from two ontologies: that of the domain concepts and another one we called the "Ontology of Domain Actions". To take advantage of this later source of knowledge, we had to specify what actions were expected to be performed by the software at any moment in time. This has been done using a variant of the CRC cards formalism. As a result, we are able to match the actions actually performed by the software with expectations using dynamic analysis based on the action ontology.

A three-layer model of source code comprehension

“…This model leverages the notion of action ontology that we first introduced in [2]. Indeed we showed how the high level business-related function of a program can be decomposed as sequences of manipulations represented as BPMN diagrams.…”

“…A model for the manipulations was introduced in [2] that we have reused without much modification. Manipulations are thought of as simple natural language declarative sentences like "The system computes the taxes".…”

“…The action concept hierarchy whose idea we first introduced in [2] is specific to our work and can be considered a general contribution of our project, since it is independent both from the program under analysis and from the domain concepts. On the other hand, the modeling of a domain concept hierarchy depends on the application domain considered.…”

Program understanding using ontologies and dynamic analysis

“…section 1.2.2). This new ontology as well as our first thoughts on how to automate the detection of its concepts were the subject of [Belmonte and Dugerdil, 2010]. The BPMN model of a functionality represents all the possible sequences of tasks that could be followed to carry out the functionality.…”