Reverse engineering software systems has become a major concern in software industry because of their sheer size and complexity. This problem needs to be tackled since the systems in question are of considerable worth to their owners and maintainers. In this article, we present the concept of a polymetric view, a lightweight software visualization technique enriched with software metrics inform...

Reverse Engineering, i.e. the analysis of software for the purpose of recovering its design documentation, e.g. in form of the conceptual architecture, is an important area of software engineering. Today, two prevalent reverse engineering approaches have emerged: (1) the clustering-based approach which tries to analyze a given software system by grouping its elements based on metric values to p...

Recently, formal approaches to reverse engineering have received considerable attention as a means of creating correct high level specifications. We show how a formal approach to reverse engineering can be applied when constructing distributed systems, eg. if we want to reuse an existing algorithm, but in a different environment, or develop a new distributed algorithm that is somehow similar to...

Abstiact-This paper analyzes difficulties arising in the use of documents produced by Reverse Engineering tools. With reference to inter-modular data Row analysis for Pascal software systems, an interactive and evolutionary tool is proposed. The tool is based on: i) the production of inter-modular data Row information by static analysis of code; ii) its representation in a Prolog program dictio...

In this paper we describe an experience of Data Reverse Engineering supported by a repository of conceptual schemas.We first introduce a set of integration/abstraction primitives that are used in order to organize a large set of conceptual schemas in a repository. We describe the methodology conceived to produce the repository of schemas of central public administrations in Italy. Then we descr...

The understanding of molecular cell biology requires insight into the structure and dynamics of networks that are made up of thousands of interacting molecules of DNA, RNA, proteins, metabolites, and other components. One of the central goals of systems biology is the unraveling of the as yet poorly characterized complex web of interactions among these components. This work is made harder by th...

The size and complexity of software systems is rapidly increasing. Meanwhile, the ability to understand and maintain such systems is decreasing almost as fast. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) promotes the notion of modeling to cope with software complexity; in this paper we report on our research that utilizes ontological modeling for understanding complex software systems. We focus the discussi...

Object-oriented frameworks are generic designs for specific application domains, that enable the reuse of designs and domain expert experience. In spite of this, framework are not simple to reuse because they are difficult to comprehend, mainly due to a lack of good documentation and supporting tools. In this work, an approach to framework comprehension based on visualization of design patterns...

This paper presents a reverse engineering approach for parameter estimation in spiking neural networks (SNNs). We consider the deterministic evolution of a time-discretized network with spiking neurons, where synaptic transmission has delays, modeled as a neural network of the generalized integrate and fire type. Our approach aims at by-passing the fact that the parameter estimation in SNN resu...

Since the beginning of the electronic era, public administrations and enterprises have been developing services, through which citizens, businesses and customers can conduct their transactions with the offering entity. Each electronic service contains a substantial amount of knowledge in the form help texts, rules of use or legislation excerpts, examples, validation checks etc. This knowledge h...