Extracting Business Rules from Information Systems
BT Technology Journal
Recycling software components extracted from legacy programs
IWPSE '01 Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution
Extracting entity-relationship diagram from a table-based legacy database
Journal of Systems and Software
QP-T: query pattern-based RDB-to-XML translation
OTM'06 Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: AWeSOMe, CAMS, COMINF, IS, KSinBIT, MIOS-CIAO, MONET - Volume Part II
ISPA'07 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing and Applications
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Recovering the semantic description of file and database structures is an important aspect of business application reverse engineering. It includes a particularly delicate activity, namely data structure extraction, i.e. finding the exact data structures and integrity constraints of the database. This process is made more complex than generally expected due to the fact that these structures and constraints often are not explicitly defined, but are translated into implicit constructs, controlled and managed through procedural code or user interface protocol for instance. This paper describes the problem of implicit structure elicitation. It proposes an analysis of this phenomenon, and of the techniques and heuristics that can be used in the elicitation process. It develops a set of efficient techniques and a strategy for the elicitation of one of the most common implicit construct, namely the foreign key. The paper also explains how DB-MAIN, a general-purpose database reverse engineering CASE tool, can help analysts elicit implicit constructs, and specifically foreign keys.