Deriving Conceptual Schema from Domain Ontology: A Web Application Reverse Engineering Approach

The heterogeneous and dynamic nature of components making up a web application, the lack of effectiveprogramming mechanisms for implementing basic software engineering principles in it, and undisciplined developmentprocesses induced by the high pressure of a very short time-to-market, make web application maintenance a challengingproblem. A relevant issue consists of reusing the methodological and technological experience in the sector of traditionalsoftware maintenance, and exploring the opportunity of using reverse engineering to support effective web applicationmaintenance. This paper presents reverse engineering approach that help to understand existing undocumented webapplications to be maintained or evolved, through the extraction from domain ontology of conceptual schema describing aweb application. The advantage of using ontology for conceptual data modelling is the reusability of domain knowledge. As aresult of it the conceptual data model will be made faster, easier and with fewer errors than creating conceptual data model inusual way. We demonstrate the value of the approach by providing an implementation that exhibits appropriatecharacteristics