information about the design and implementation of software systems. Before tools can exchange information, they must share, at some level, the organization for the data exchanged. That is, they must share a schema. In this paper we examine the various ways in which schemas are represented and used in tools. Schema use is classified according to how and where a schema is defined, leading to the identification of four patterns of exchange. We examine these exchange patterns and discuss how each has been used in existing tool integration technologies. An evaluation of each exchange pattern against the requirements for a standard exchange format reveal the pattern of schema use that is most suitable for integrating tools.

In this paper we present a proposal for a novel approach to facilitating transparent interoperability among reverse engineering tools. We characterize the architectural and operational characteristics of reverse engineering tools and demonstrate that many similarities exist among them. Taking full advantage of these similarities, we outline an approach for creating a domain ontology of operational and representational concepts for a given set of tools. A special adapter is proposed that makes use of this ontology to facilitate transparent interoperability among them.

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