A Unified Meta-Model for Concept-Based Reverse Engineering

While programming is modeling the reality, reverse engineering is concerned with recovering it from the code. Parts of this reality can be formalized as concepts and relations among them. As previous research suggests, the identification of these concepts is a key issue in automating program analysis. Their central role requires advance reverse engineering tasks to consider them first-class citizens. In this paper we unify the classical, structure-based reverse engineering meta-models with a meta-model describing concepts and their relations. Our unified meta-model establishes an explicit mapping between concepts and their implementations in a program. Instances of the meta-model are built in a semi-automatic manner by analyzing the program’s identifiers. Using this model allows us to raise the abstraction level by viewing the program from the perspective of concepts it implements. This enables a higher degree of automation in the reverse engineering endeavor.