Extracting Domain Ontologies from Domain Specific APIs

Domain specific APIs offer their clients ready-to-use implementations of domain concepts. Beside being interfaces between the worlds of humans and computers, domain specific APIs contain a considerable amount of domain knowledge. Due to the big abstraction gap between the real world and today's programming languages, in addition to the knowledge about their domain, these APIs are cluttered with a considerable amount of noise in form of implementation detail. Furthermore, an API offers a particular view on its domain and different APIs regard their domains from different perspectives. In this paper we propose an approach for building domain ontologies by identifying commonalities between domain specific APIs that target the same domain. Besides our ontology extraction algorithm, we present a methodology for eliminating the noise and we sketch possible usage-scenarios of the ontologies for program analysis and understanding. We evaluate our approach through a set of case-studies on extracting domain ontologies from well-known domain specific APIs.