Ontological interpretation of object-oriented programming abstractions

Assigning ontological categories to OO programming abstractions is a task of ontological interpretation. In this paper, we describe an approach for ontological interpretation in which the task of interpretation is seen as a classification problem. The task of interpretation is performed in two stages, namely syntactic feature identification and ontological categorization. An analysis technique called Ontological Cards (Ontocard) is developed to identify ontologically relevant syntactic features from programs. The ontological card includes a set of syntactic and relational features describing the nature of program elements. A rule-based classifier system is implemented to classify programming abstractions into ontological categories. The approach is assessed with the help of two different Java-based applications. The descriptions make use of examples outlining issues and challenges involved in the approach.