scholarly journals BUSINESS KNOWLEDGE EXTRACTION FROM LEGACY INFORMATION SYSTEMS

2006 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bronius Paradauskas ◽  
Aurimas Laurikaitis

This article discusses the process of enterprise knowledge extraction from relational database and source code of legacy information systems. Problems of legacy systems and main solutions for them are briefly described here. The uses of data reverse engineering and program understanding techniques to automatically infer as much as possible the schema and semantics of a legacy information system is analyzed. Eight step data reverse engineering algorithm for knowledge extraction from legacy systems is provided. A hypothetical example of knowledge extraction from legacy information system is presented.

Author(s):  
ULRIKE KÖLSCH ◽  
JÜRGEN LASCHEWSKI

There is every indication that an object-oriented view of an information system is a solid foundation for understanding its legacy organization, for relating it to the environment in which it is embedded and for guiding its reengineering. In this paper we present a framework based upon the formal object-oriented specification language TROLL, which provides an object-oriented view of legacy information systems. The aim is to combine existing methods and keep results in a common and suitable description base which provides the appropriate form for deriving object specifications from the legacy IS. We usethe language TROLL not only as description language, but also as a framework to support the maintenance engineers in their reverse engineering tasks by giving hints about what to do next to complete the object specifications. The result of the approach is a formal object-oriented specification of the legacy IS that is suitable both for developing a new IS or for reengineering the legacy system.


Author(s):  
Jean-Luc Hainaut ◽  
Jean Henrard ◽  
Didier Roland ◽  
Jean-Marc Hick ◽  
Vincent Englebert

Database reverse engineering consists of recovering the abstract descriptions of files and databases of legacy information systems. A legacy information system can be defined as a “data-intensive application, such as [a] business system based on hundreds or thousands of data files (or tables), that significantly resists modifications and changes” (Brodie & Stonebraker, 1995). The objective of database reverse engineering is to recover the logical and conceptual descriptions, or schemas, of the permanent data of a legacy information system, that is, its database, be it implemented as a set of files or through an actual database management system.


Author(s):  
N Yarushkina ◽  
A Romanov ◽  
A Filippov ◽  
A Dolganovskaya ◽  
M Grigoricheva

This article describes the method of integrating information systems of an aircraft factory with the production capacity planning system based on the ontology merging. The ontological representation is formed for each relational database (RDB) of integrated information systems. The ontological representation is formed in the process of analyzing the structure of the relational database of the information system (IS). Based on the ontological representations merging the integrating data model is formed. The integrating data model is a mechanism for semantic integration of data sources.


Author(s):  
Ricardo Pérez-Castillo ◽  
Ignacio García Rodríguez de Guzmán ◽  
Mario Piattini

Legacy information systems can be a serious headache for companies because, on the one hand, these systems cannot be thrown away since they store a lot of valuable business knowledge over time, and on the other hand, they cannot be maintained easily at an acceptable cost. For many years, reengineering has been a solution to this problem because it facilitates the reuse of the software artifacts and knowledge embedded in the system. However, reengineering often fails due to the fact that it carries out non-standardized and ad hoc processes. Currently, software modernization, and particularly ADM (Architecture-Driven Modernization), standardized by the OMG, is proving to be an important solution to that problem, since ADM advocates carrying out reengineering processes taking into account the principles and standards of model-driven development. This chapter provides an overview of ADM and shows how it allows legacy information systems to evolve, making them more agile, preserving the embedded business knowledge, and reducing maintenance costs. Also, this chapter presents the software archeology process using ADM and some ADM success stories.


Author(s):  
Minh Ngoc Ngo

Due to the need to reengineer and migrating aging software and legacy systems, reverse engineering has started to receive some attention. It has now been established as an area in software engineering to understand the software structure, to recover or extract design and features from programs mainly from source code. The inference of design and feature from codes has close similarity with data mining that extracts and infers information from data. In view of their similarity, reverse engineering from program codes can be called as program mining. Traditionally, the latter has been mainly based on invariant properties and heuristics rules. Recently, empirical properties have been introduced to augment the existing methods. This article summarizes some of the work in this area.


Author(s):  
Leonid Stoimenov

Research in information systems interoperability is motivated by the ever-increasing heterogeneity of the computer world. New generations of applications, such as geographic information systems (GISs), have much more demands in comparison to possibilities of legacy information systems and traditional database technology. The popularity of GIS in governmental and municipality institutions induce increasing amounts of available information (Stoimenov, Ðordevic-Kajan, & Stojanovic, 2000). In a local community environment (city services, local offices, local telecom, public utilities, water and power supply services, etc.), different information systems deal with huge amounts of available information, where most data in databases are geo-referenced. GIS applications often have to process geo-data obtained from various geo-information communities. Also, information that exists in different spatial database may be useful for many other GIS applications. Numerous legacy systems should be coupled with GIS systems, which present additional difficulties in developing end-user applications.


Author(s):  
Steve McRobb ◽  
Richard Millham ◽  
Jianjun Pu ◽  
Hongji Yang

This chapter presents a report of an experimental approach that uses WSL as an intermediate language for the visualisation of COBOL legacy systems in UML. Key UML techniques are identified that can be used for visualisation. Many cases were studied, and one is presented in detail. The report concludes by demonstrating how this approach can be used to build a software tool that automates the visualisation task. Furthermore, understanding a system is of critical importance to a developer who must be able to understand the business processes being modeled by the system along with the system’s functionality, structure, events, and interactions with external entities. Such an understanding is of even more importance in reverse engineering. Although developers have the advantage of having the source code available, system documentation is often missing or incomplete, and the original users, whose requirements were used to design the system, are often long gone.


Author(s):  
Youcef Baghdadi ◽  
Naoufel Kraiem

Reverse engineering techniques have become very important within the maintenance process providing several benefits. They retrieve abstract representations that not only facilitate the comprehension of legacy systems but also refactor these representations. Business process archaeology has emerged as a set of techniques and tools to recover business processes from source code and to preserve the existing business functions and rules buried in legacy source code. This chapter presents a reverse engineering process and a tool to retrieve services from running databases. These services are further reused in composing business processes with respect to Service-Oriented Architecture, a new architectural style that promotes agility.


2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (01) ◽  
pp. 1350005
Author(s):  
RICARDO PÉREZ-CASTILLO ◽  
MARIO PIATTINI ◽  
BARBARA WEBER

Concept location is a key activity during software modernization since it allows maintainers to exactly determine what pieces of source code support a specific concept. Real-world business processes and information systems providing operational IT support for respective processes can be misaligned as a consequence of uncontrolled maintenance over time. When concepts supported by an information system are getting outdated or misaligned, concept location becomes a time-consuming and error-prone task. Moreover, enterprise information systems (which implement business processes) embed significant business knowledge over time that is neither present nor documented anywhere else. To support the evolution of existing information systems, the embedded knowledge must first be retrieved and depicted in up-to-date business process models and then be mapped to the source code. This paper addresses this issue through a concept location approach that considers business activities as the key concept to be located and discovers different partial business process views for each piece of source code. Thus, the concept location problem becomes the problem of extracting such views. This approach follows model-driven development principles and an automatic model transformation is implemented to facilitate its adoption. Moreover, a case study involving two real-life information system demonstrates its feasibility.


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