A semantic foundation for architectural reengineering and interchange

Abstract

The article describes our view on the importance of exchanging not only system information in the reengineering community, but also exchanging a description of the semantics that underly the extraction, annotation and augmentation of the information one wishes to exchange. The semantics are more than the schema of the information exchanged. They include the rationale for the structure of the schema itself. We also make the point that we need to be explicit about what it means to reconstruct architecture, in terms of the architectural semantics that we are hypothesizing for the system being analyzed. We present the discussion in the context of a revised set of levels based on the CORUM II model.