Through the Looking Glass

Programming is modeling the reality. Most of the times, the mapping between source code and the real world con-cepts is captured implicitly in the names of identifiers. Mak-ing these mappings explicit enables us to regard programs from a conceptual perspective and thereby to detect seman-tic defects such as (logical) redundancies in the implemen-tation of concepts and improper naming of program enti-ties. We present real world examples of these problems found in the Java standard library and establish a formal framework that allows their concise classification. Based on this framework, we present our method for recovering the mappings between the code and the real world con-cepts expressed as ontologies. These explicit mappings en-able semi-automatic identification of the discussed defect classes. 1. Modeling the Reality “When I choose a word, ” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.