Navigating the textual redundancy web in legacy source

  • Authors:

  • J. Howard Johnson

  • Affiliations:

  • Institute for Information Technology, National Research Council Canada, Montreal Road, Building M-50, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0R6.

  • Venue:
  • CASCON '96 Proceedings of the 1996 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
  • Year:
  • 1996

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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.