An architecture for interoperable program understanding tools

Program understanding tools are currently not interoperable, leading researchers to waste significant resources reinventing already existing tools. Even commercial environments that have been designed to support the construction of program understanding tools have serious flaws in this regard. This paper discusses CORUM (Common Object-based Re-engineering Unified Model), an architecture to support interoperability between program understanding tools, and it provides several examples of CORUM's use in the construction of new tools for concept recognition and program visualization.