Intentional Meaning of Programs
Daniel Ratiu · 2009
In this dissertation we present a new approach for bridging the gap between the domain knowledge and programs by defining explicit mappings between program entities and domain concepts shared within domain ontologies. We call these mappings the ``intentional interpretation'' and they define explicitly the ``intentional meaning'' of a program. We use the intentional meaning to characterize the degree in which the code reflects the domain knowledge. We investigate how do the mismatches between the programs and the domain knowledge affect different quality attributes of programs. In order to automate our analyses we present a technique for automatic recovery of the intentional meaning based on the similarities between the names of concepts and program identifiers. In order to obtain knowledge for our analyses, we develop a method for automatically extracting fragments of domain ontologies by analyzing similarities of domain specific APIs.