How Programs Represent Reality (and how they don't)

Abstract

Programming is modeling the reality. Most of the times, the mapping between source code and the real world concepts are captured implicitly in the names of identifiers. Making these mappings explicit enables us to regard programs from a conceptual perspective and thereby to detect semantic defects such as (logical) redundancies in the implementation of concepts and improper naming of program entities. We present real world examples of these problems found in the Java standard library and establish a formal framework that allows their concise classification. Based on this framework, we present our method for recovering the mappings between the code and the real world concepts expressed as ontologies. These explicit mappings enable semi-automatic identification of the discussed defect classes