Towards a Reverse Engineering Ontology

In a review of existing reverse engineering literature, it became clear that there is no shared vision on key topics in reverse engineering. As a result, the many research contributions appear to lack uniformity with regard to the way results are reported. In this short paper, we present ”the Reverse Engineering wiki”1, an initiative started at ICPC 2006 in the working session on Experimental Settings in Program Comprehension. This wiki allows reverse engineering researchers and practitioners to collaborate freely on a demarcation and description of the field of reverse engineering. First, we address the need for this initiative. Second, we advocate the use of an ontology to satisfy this need. We present our current results in implementing this solution and describe valuable usage scenario’s. Finally, we enlist key activities in the continuation of this initiative, stressing that collaboration will be a key success factor in this initiative.