Ontological excavation: unearthing the core concepts of the application

Abstract

Applications possess and implement a specific theoryof the world or ontology. Recovering and modeling thisontology may help inform software developers seeking toextend or adapt an application's functionality for its nextrelease. We have developed a method for the black-boxreverse engineering or excavation of an application'sontology. The ontology is represented as a semanticnetwork, and graph theoretic measures are used toidentify core concepts. Core concepts contributedisproportionately to the structural integrity of theontology. We present analyses of ontologies excavatedfrom several interactive applications. From a set ofseveral candidate metrics for identifying core conceptswe find node betweenness centrality is a good measure ofa concept's influence on ontological integrity and that thek-core algorithm may be useful for identifying cohesivesubgroups of core features. We conclude by discussinghow these analyses can be applied to support applicationevolution.