Fusing ambiguous domain knowledge slices in a reverse engineering process

Abstract

Recovering domain knowledge from legacy code plays an important role in the new information technology era, which can be of help for program understanding, system evolution and software reuse. Traditional methods for domain knowledge recovery from source code did not sufficiently address the issue of ambiguity handling, in particular, the propagation of ambiguity among multiple domain knowledge slices recovered from source code in the software reverse engineering process. We present a novel approach to recovering unambiguous domain knowledge from legacy code, where isolated ambiguous domain knowledge slices are "fused" together in an iterative ambiguity propagation process and hence the disambiguity of these recovered knowledge slices is increased.