A concept-oriented belief revision approach to domain knowledge recovery from source code

Domain knowledge is the soul of software systems, after decades of software development, domain knowledge has reached a certain degree of saturation. The recovery of domain knowledge from source code is beneficial to many sof tware engineering activities, in particular software evolution. In the real world, the ambiguous appearance of domain knowledge embedded in source cod e constitutes the biggest barrier to recovering reliable domain knowledge. In this paper, we introduce an innovative approach to recovering domain kno wledge with enhanced reliability from source code. In particular, we di,ide domain knowledge into interconnected knowledge slices and match these know ledge slices against the source code. Each knowledge slice has its own auth enticity evaluation function which takes the belief of the evidence it need s as input and the authenticity of the knowledge slice as output. R;Moreove r, the knowledge slices are arranged to exchange beliefs with each other th rough interconnections, i.e. concepts, so that a better evaluation of the a uthenticity of these knowledge slices can be obtained, The decision on ackn owledging recovered knowledge slices can therefore be made more easily, Our approach, rooted as it is in cognitive science and social psychology is al so widely applicable to other knowledge recovery tasks. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.