Innovative Operating Software

This effort examines the merit of using Semantic Web technology, as developed by the World Wide Web Consortium and DARPA, to reduce the time and money required by MDA to reuse and maintain software. MDA has a large collection of legacy software and algorithms in a variety of programming languages. These algorithms are useful throughout MDA, yet rewriting code is costly and risky. In a Phase I SBIR, we used eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and ontologies to develop a framework for language translation. We propose to complete the instantiation of our prototype framework, which will reduce the resources required to reuse legacy software by translating from original languages to a variety of programming languages. The heart of the framework is the definition of an abstract language, CodeML (Code Markup Language) written in OWL (Web Ontology Language) format. After translating legacy code into CodeML as an intermediate step, the framework can extract and export a numerical algorithm's semantics, analyze it for precision and correctness and export it to mathematical analysis programs using XML technologies. MDA can then share algorithms and tools across platforms. We propose a repository to store the CodeML representation with an intelligent search capability using Semantic Web technology.