Service Identification via Ontology Mapping

A service-oriented software reengineering is essential for legacy systems to survive in the service-oriented computing environment. In this paper, a method for the identification of reusable legacy code is proposed to support Service-Oriented Software Reengineering (SOSR).Ontologies for SOSR, which consist of Domain Concept Ontology (DCO), Functionality Ontology (FO) and Software Component Ontology (SCO), are defined and developed. These ontologies store knowledge of both application domain and code entities, which support further legacy code analysis. Based on SCO, the identification of service candidates in legacy systems is achieved by mapping FO and SCO via a novel method combining Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) and Relational Concept Analysis (RCA). The case study shows that the method can help software developers and maintainers to reengineer the tightly coupled legacy information systems to the loosely coupled and agile information systems.