On reuse of source code components in modernizing enterprise systems

Modernization of enterprise systems creates new challenges to corporations on how to transform the existing IT assets into service-oriented architectures. Exposing existing system functionality in the form of enterprise services is one efficient way to leverage the value and reusability of enterprise systems. In this respect, existing system components can be used as the foundation of newly created services. However, one problem to overcome is the lack of system semantics to support the reuse of existing source code. In this paper, we present an approach to discover semantic relations between high-level business functionalities and low-level source code components. Our approach is based on the idea that the gap between service components and source code components of an enterprise system can be bridged by mapping through entity similarity. The procedure of our approach consists of two steps; (1) generating ontologies of source code components and the proposed enterprise services, (2) semantic mapping of ontology entities through similarity measures. We evaluate our approach in the framework of a commercial enterprise systems application. Initial results indicate that the proposed Zproach is useful for discovering service-related knowledge from existing source code components. © 2008 IEEE.