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Ontological approach for the semantic recovery of traceability links between software artefacts

Ontological approach for the semantic recovery of traceability links between software artefacts

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© The Institution of Engineering and Technology
Published

Traceability links provide support for software engineers in understanding relations and dependencies among software artefacts created during the software development process. The authors focus on re-establishing traceability links between existing source code and documentation to support software maintenance. They present a novel approach that addresses this issue by creating formal ontological representations for both documentation and source code artefacts. Their approach recovers traceability links at the semantic level, utilising structural and semantic information found in various software artefacts. These linked ontologies are supported by ontology reasoners to allow the inference of implicit relations among these software artefacts.

Inspec keywords: program diagnostics; system documentation; ontologies (artificial intelligence); inference mechanisms; software maintenance; programming language semantics

Other keywords: ontological reasoning; semantic recovery; software maintenance; software documentation; software engineer; software artefact; formal ontological representation; traceability link; software development process

Subjects: Formal languages and computational linguistics; Diagnostic, testing, debugging and evaluating systems; Knowledge engineering techniques; Software engineering techniques

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