Currently, the main objective of all programmers and designers is to render interactive systems usable and effective. So, users can complete their tasks and achieve their goals. To ensure that, programmers and designers require good understanding of system characteristics and functionality. This work focused on an approach to automate the process of extracting the system information. The approach is based on the ADM initiative as the best solution for system's evolution. The OMG ADM Task Force defines a set of standards to facilitate that, like Knowledge Discovery Metamodel, captures design knowledge needed for the construction of future user interfaces. Actually, KDM allows abstract structural and semantical aspect representation. However, no support exists for expressing behavior of system content, interaction, user control, and activities of the front-end applications. The authors hope to alleviate this lack by extending KDM model to fulfill the needs of complete abstract model construction.
TopBackground
As cited before, ADM provides standards in the field of reverse engineering. These standards are based on models and meta-models for modernizing legacy software systems. The KDM metamodel is the main one.
To support modernization activities, OMG defined the KDM standard that presents a platform-independent representation of the software systems to be analyzed.
KDM is a meta-model used to represent system artifacts at a high level of abstraction. It is the basic element for the ADM approach.
The main purpose of the KDM specification is to gain comprehension of source code. It provides a knowledge intermediate representation of existing software systems (OMG, 2016a). It captures precise knowledge about the existing applications and makes the interoperability between the reverse engineering tools possible.
An ADM-based process using KDM starts by analyzing the different legacy software artifacts in order to build a higher-abstraction level model in a bottom-up mode through reverse engineering techniques (Pérez‐Castillo et al., 2012).
Obviously, the KDM represents the core of the ADM initiative because it provides a summary of the application structure and a common interchange format intended to represent existing software assets, thus allowing tool interoperability.
KDM is organized in several packages each one corresponds to an architectural view of the system (for example, platform, user interface, or data) and represents software artifacts as entities and relations. These packages as detailed in Table 1, are classified into four abstraction layers to improve modularity and separation of concerns: infrastructure, program elements, runtime resource, and abstractions (OMG, 2016a).