To maintain and understand large applications, it is important to know their architecture. The first problem is that unlike classes and packages, architecture is not explicitly represented in the code. The second problem is that successful applications evolve over time, so their architecture inevitably drifts. Reconstructing the architecture and checking whether it is still valid is therefore an important aid. While there is a plethora of approaches and techniques supporting architecture reconstruction, there is no comprehensive software architecture reconstruction state of the art and it is often difficult to compare the approaches. This article presents a state of the art in software architecture reconstruction approaches.

An infrastructure is a set of interconnected structural elements, such as tools and schemas, that provide a framework for supporting an entire structure. The reverse engineering community has recognized the importance of interoperability, the cooporation of two or more systems to enable the exchange and utilization of data, and has noted that the current lack of interoperability is a contributing factor to the lack of adoption of available infrastructures. To address the problems of interoperability and reproducing previous results, we present an infrastructure that supports interoperability among reverse engineering tools and applications. We present the design of our infrastructure, including the hierarchy of schemas that captures the interactions among graph structures. We also develop and utilize our implementation, which is designed using a GXL-based pipe-filter architecture, to perform a case study that demonstrates the feasibility of our infrastructure. 1

We present initial results from an international and multi-disciplinary research collaboration that aims at the construction of a reference corpus of web genres. The primary application scenario for which we plan to build this resource is the automatic identification of web genres. Web genres are rather difficult to capture and to describe in their entirety, but we plan for the finished reference corpus to contain multi-level tags of the respective genre or genres a web document or a website instantiates. As the construction of such a corpus is by no means a trivial task, we discuss several alternatives that are, for the time being, mostly based on existing collections. Furthermore, we discuss a shared set of genre categories and a multi-purpose tool as two additional prerequisites for a reference corpus of web genres. 1.

Abstract: TGraphs are directed graphs with typed, attributed, and ordered nodes and edges. These properties leverage the use of graphs as models for all kinds of artifacts in the context of software reengineering. TGraphs are accompanied by metamodel based technologies to define, manipulate, analyze, query, visualize, and transform graphs. This paper summarizes the work accomplished around TGraphs and graph based modeling over the last decade. We introduce TGraphs as a versatile and expressive formalism and demonstrate their well-suitedness for solving reverse engineering problems. 1

Abstract. In this position paper we discuss a number of issues relating to model metrics, with particular emphasis on metrics for UML models. Our discussion is presented as a series of nine observations where we examine some of the existing work on applying metrics to UML models, present some of our own work in this area, and specify some topics for future research that we regard as important. Furthermore, we identify three categories of challeges for model metrics and describe how our nine observations can be partitioned into these categories. Keywords: software metrics, object-oriented systems, UML, metamodels.

Abstract. Graph rewrite systems provide only elementary primitives – many applications require more complex structures though. We present a rewrite system for omnigraphs, a formal extension of hypergraphs with the ability to connect multiple nodes and edges with a single edge. We exemplify the adequacy of this approach in the domain of Model Driven Development (MDD): Using our system trivializes the representation and transformation of advanced UML structures that are awkward to handle with common approaches. Key words: graph rewriting, hypergraph, omnigraph, supergraph 1

In this position paper we discuss some of the existing work on applying metrics to UML models, present some of our own work in this area, and specify some topics for future research that we regard as important.

To maintain and understand large applications, it is crucial to know their architecture. The first problem is that architectures are not explicitly represented in the code as classes and packages are. The second problem is that successful applications evolve over time so their architecture inevitably drifts. Reconstructing and checking whether the architecture is still valid is thus an important aid. While there is a plethora of approaches and techniques supporting architecture reconstruction, there is no comprehensive state of the art and it is often difficult to compare the approaches. This article presents a first state of the art in software architecture reconstruction, with the desire to support the understanding of the field. 1.

Software reverse engineering is a crucial task to reconstruct high-level views of a software system—with the purpose of understanding and/or maintaining it—when the only reliable source of information is the source code, or even the system binaries. This paper discusses key reverse engineering concepts through a UML conceptual model. Specifically, the model is composed of a set of UML class diagrams describing relationships existing among reverse engineering processes, tools, artifacts, and stakeholders. 1

in the organization of large-scale syntactic