An infrastructure to support interoperability in reverse engineering

An infrastructure is a set of interconnected structural elements, such as tools and schemas, that provide a framework for supporting an entire structure. The reverse engineering community has recognized the importance of interoperability, the cooporation of two or more systems to enable the exchange and utilization of data, and has noted that the current lack of interoperability is a contributing factor to the lack of adoption of available infrastructures. To address the problems of interoperability and reproducing previous results, we present an infrastructure that supports interoperability among reverse engineering tools and applications. We present the design of our infrastructure, including the hierarchy of schemas that captures the interactions among graph structures. We also develop and utilize our implementation, which is designed using a GXL-based pipe-filter architecture, to perform a case study that demonstrates the feasibility of our infrastructure.