Paper Info
Title
Ontological Excavation: Unearthing the core concepts of the application
Abstract
Applications possess and implement a specific "theoryof the world" or ontology. Recovering and modeling thisontology may help inform software developers seeking toextend or adapt an application's functionality for its nextrelease. We have developed a method for the black-boxreverse engineering or excavation of an application'sontology. The ontology is represented as a semanticnetwork, and graph theoretic measures are used toidentify core concepts. Core concepts contributedisproportionately to the structural integrity of theontology. We present analyses of ontologies excavatedfrom several interactive applications. From a set ofseveral candidate metrics for identifying core conceptswe find node betweenness centrality is a good measure ofa concept's influence on ontological integrity and that thek-core algorithm may be useful for identifying cohesivesubgroups of core features. We conclude by discussinghow these analyses can be applied to support applicationevolution.
Year
DOI
Venue
2003
10.1109/WCRE.2003.1287265
WCRE
Keywords
Field
DocType
software metrics,node betweenness centrality,ontological excavation,core concept,domain analysis,software evolution,black-boxreverse engineering,core feature,good measure ofa concept,reverse engineering,structural integrity,toidentify core concept,interactive application,graph theoretic measure,ontological integrity,betweenness centrality,computer architecture,software development,ontologies,scheduling,software maintenance,application software,information systems,software metric,semantic network
Ontology (information science),Ontology,Systems engineering,Software engineering,Computer science,Reverse engineering,Betweenness centrality,Software metric,Software maintenance,Software evolution,Application software
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
0-7695-2027-8
16
1.36
References 
Authors
17
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Idris Hsi1374.49
Colin M. Potts21492222.21
Melody Moore3161.36