A Reverse Engineering Process for Inferring Conceptual Models from Canonicalized Tables

Conceptual models remain a main technique for visualize and formalize the basic concepts and relationships of any subject area. They provide a communicative function between subject domain specialists and software developers. Despite the existence of tools and notations for conceptual modeling the problem of retrieval of information about concepts and relationships or reverse engineering is stay urgent. Spreadsheets are one of the data sources for reverse engineering. In this paper we propose to transform the canonicalized spreadsheets. UML class diagrams were used as a target formalism for visualization of the obtained models. The description of the transformation algorithm and the mean of its implementation, namely, the Personal Knowledge Base Designer (PKBD) are given. Discussions of experiments are presented. This work is considered as a part of the project for development of a framework for creating systems of data extraction from arbitrary spreadsheets.