Design Diagrams as Ontological Sources: Ontology Extraction and Utilization for Software Asset Reuse

Abstract

Ontology is a basic building block for the semantic web. An active line of research in semantic web is focused on how to build and evolve ontologies using the information from different ontological sources inherent in the domain. A large part of the IT industry uses software engineering methodologies to build software solutions that solve real-world problems. For them, instead of creating solutions from scratch, reusing previously built software as much as possible is a business-imperative today. As part of their projects, they use design diagrams to capture various facets of the software development process. We discuss how semantic web technologies can help solutionbuilding organizations achieve software reuse by first learning ontologies from design diagrams of existing solutions and then using them to create design diagrams for new solutions. Our technique, called OntExtract, extracts domain ontology information (entities and their relationship(s)) from class diagrams and further refines the extracted information using diagrams that express dynamic interactions among entities such as sequence diagram. A proof of concept implementations is also developed as a Plug-in over a commercial development environment IBM’s Rational Software Architect.