Using Semantic Inference for Software Understanding and Design Recovery

Software understanding is often refers to the processes and activities undertaken by software engineers to fully comprehend complex software systems. Capturing software design can certainly enable a better environment for software understanding and reuse. This paper extends our previous work on automatic design pattern recovery and details our vision towards a comprehensive environment for software understanding. Our approach utilizes Semantic Web technologies to provide a formal and explicit semantic-based representation of software systems. Through extended case studies and tool evaluations, we show that this software representation enables a detection mechanism that is both effective and usable.