From reality to programs and (not quite) back again

Making explicit the mappings between real-world con-cepts and program elements that implement them is an es-sential step in understanding, using or evaluating the pub-lic interface of programs, libraries and other collections of classes that model core domain concepts. Unfortunately, due to the big abstraction gap between the modeled domain and today’s programming languages, the mapping is most of the times ambiguous as concepts and relations from the real world are distorted and diffused in the code. In this pa-per we present a comprehensive formal framework for de-scribing the many-to-many mappings between domain con-cepts and the program elements, real-world relations and program relations and the real-world concept names and program identifiers. This framework allows us to describe and discuss typical classes of diffusion of the domain knowl-edge in code. Based on our formal framework we describe an algorithm to recover the mappings between entities from an ontology and program elements. We illustrate the frame-work by using examples from the Java standard library. 1