Navigating the textual redundancy web in legacy source

ABSTRACT

Understanding the source, data, and documentation files associated with legacy systems in preparation for maintenance or reengineering is an increasingly important problem for many organizations. A useful tool to support these activities considers the collection of files as text and supports analysis and navigation by exploiting connections that result from the occurrence of exact matches of substrings that derive from the languages used, the design process, the use of common idioms, and maintenance activity. By navigating these paths some understanding of the overall structure can be inferred.A tool for data visualization and navigation of the textual redundancy web based on the technology of HTML and the World Wide Web is described. After an introduction to underlying technology of Analysis of Redundancy in Text and its normalized data model, the entity types are mapped to HTML pages, each of which represents an entity instance and is connected to its neighbours by hypertext links.In order to improve the usefulness of the resulting pages a certain amount of denormalization and careful layout was found to be necessary. The success of this prototype can be attributed to a coming together of well-established ideas from the areas of database design and hypertext document preparation with the new web-based technologies.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
        D.2.13 Reusable Software
            Subjects: Reuse models

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.7 Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement
          Subjects: Restructuring, reverse engineering, and reengineering

  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.4 Systems and Software

          Nouns: World Wide Web (WWW)
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.4 Hypertext/Hypermedia
          Subjects: Navigation

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.7 DOCUMENT AND TEXT PROCESSING
      I.7.1 Document and Text Editing
          Subjects: Document management

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY
      K.4.3 Organizational Impacts
          Subjects: Reengineering

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Management, Measurement, Theory