Abstract
In today’s dynamic business environments, organizations are under pressure to modernize their existing software systems in order to respond to changing business demands. Service oriented architectures provide a composition framework to create new business functionalities from autonomous building blocks called services, enabling organizations to quickly adapt to changing conditions and requirements. Characteristics of services offer the promise of leveraging the value of enterprise systems through source code reuse. In this respect, existing system components can be used as the foundation of newly created services. However, one problem to overcome is the lack of business semantics to support the reuse of existing source code. Without sufficient semantic knowledge about the code in the context of business functionality, it would be impossible to utilize source code components in services development. In this paper, we present an automated approach to enrich source code components with business semantics. Our approach is based on the idea that the gap between the two ends of an enterprise system—(1) services as processes and (2) source code—can be bridged via similarity of data definitions used in both ends. We evaluate our approach in the framework of a commercial enterprise systems application. Initial results indicate that the proposed approach is useful for annotating source code components with business specific knowledge.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aho, A. V., Lam, M. S., Sethi, R., & Ullman, J. D. (2006). Compilers: Principles, techniques, and tools (2nd edition). Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc.
Balasooriya, J., Padhye, M., Prasad, S. K., & Navathe, S. B. (2005). BondFlow: A system for distributed coordination of workflows over web services. In Proceedings of 19th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium.
Chapman, S. (2006). String similarity metrics for information integration. Retrieved from http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~sam/stringmetrics.html
Chapman, S. (2007). SimMetrics (Version 1.6.2.) [Computer Software]. Available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/simmetrics/
Chikofsky, E. J., & Cross, J. H., II. (1990). Reverse engineering and design recovery: a taxonomy. Software, IEEE, 7(1), 13–17.
Cohen, W. W., Ravikumar, P., & Fienberg, S. E. (2006). SecondString [Computer Software]. Available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/secondstring/
Cohen, W. W., Ravikumar, P., & Fienberg, S. E. (2003). A comparison of string distance metrics for name-matching tasks. In Proceedings of the IJCAI Workshop on Information Integration on the Web (IIWeb) (pp. 73–78).
Cornella-Dorda, S., Wallnau, K., Seacord, R. C., & Robert, J. (2000). A survey of legacy system modernization approaches. Technical Report CMU/SEI-2000-TN-003, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
DeBaud, J. M., Moopen, B., & Rugaber, S. (1994). Domain analysis and reverse engineering. In Proceedings of International Conference on Software Maintenance (pp. 326–335).
Gabriel, D. (2008). SAP Network Wiki. Retrieved from https://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/ESpackages/Sales+Order+Processing
Guo, G. Y., Atlee, J. M., & Kazman, R. (1999). A software architecture reconstruction method. In Proceedings of Working Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA) (pp. 15–33).
Gravano, L., Ipeirotis, P. G., Jagadish, H. V., Koudas, N., Muthukrishnan, S., Pietarinen, L., et al. (2001). Using q-grams in a DBMS for approximate string processing. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, 24(4), 28–34.
Ilk, N., Zhao, J. L., & Hofmann, P. (2008). On reuse of source code components in modernizing enterprise systems. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Advanced Management of Information for Globalized Enterprises (AMIGE’08).
Jaro, M. A. (1995). Probabilistic linkage of large public health data files. Statistics in Medicine, 14(5), 491–198.
Kazman, R., & Carriére, S. J. (1999). Playing detective: reconstructing software architecture from available evidence. Automated Software Engineering, 6(2), 107–138.
Kondrak, G. (2005). N-Gram similarity and distance. In String Processing and Information Retrieval, 115–126.
Kuhn, A., Ducasse, S., & Girba, T. (2005). Enriching reverse engineering with semantic clustering. In Proceedings of 12th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (pp. 133–142).
Kumar, A., & Zhao, J. L. (1999). Dynamic routing and operational controls in workflow management systems. Management Science, 45(2), 253–272.
Lawrie, D., Field, H., & Binkley, D. (2007). Extracting meaning from abbreviated identifiers. In Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM’07).
Lemahieu, W. (2001). Web Service description, advertising and discovery: WSDL and beyond. In J. Vandenbulcke & M. Snoeck (Eds.), New Directions in Software Engineering. Leuven University Press.
Murphy, G. C., & Notkin, D. (1996). Lightweight lexical model extraction. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 5(3), 262–292.
Panchenko, O., & Zeier, A. (2008). Searching and finding concepts in service-oriented enterprise software. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Advanced Management of Information for Globalized Enterprises (AMIGE’08).
Peltz, C. (2003). Web services orchestration and choreography. Computer, 36(10), 46–52.
Pinzger, M., Fischer, M., Gall, H., & Jazayeri, M. (2002). Revealer: A lexical pattern matcher for architecture recovery. In Proceedings of the Ninth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE).
Singla, P., & Domingos, P. (2006). Entity resolution with Markov Logic. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) (pp. 572–582).
Stohr, E. A., & Zhao, J. L. (2001). Workflow automation: overview and research issues. Information System Frontiers, 3(3), 281–296.
van den Brand, M., Klint, P., & Verhoef, C. (1997). Re-engineering needs generic programming language technology. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 32, 54–61.
Vara, J. M., de Castro, V., & Marcos, E. (2005). WSDL automatic generation from UML models in a MDA framework. International Journal of Web Services Practices, 1(1), 1–12.
Vitharana, P., Bhaskaran, K., Jain, H., Wang, H. J., & Zhao, J. L. (2007). Service-oriented enterprises and architectures: State of the art and research opportunities. In Proceedings of the Americas Conferences on Information Systems 2007 (ACIS’07).
W3C, World Wide Web Consortium (2001). Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1. Retrieved on April 8, 2009, from W3C Web site: http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl
Weiderman, N. H., Bergey, J. K., Smith, D. B., & Tilley, S. R. (1997). Approaches to legacy system evolution. Technical Report CMU/SEI-97-TR-014, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Wirth, N. (1996). Compiler construction. Addison Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ilk, N., Zhao, J.L., Goes, P. et al. Semantic enrichment process: An approach to software component reuse in modernizing enterprise systems. Inf Syst Front 13, 359–370 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-010-9286-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-010-9286-5