Representação ontológica de frameworks de mapeamento objeto/relacional

Abstract

The emergence of the Object Oriented and Relational paradigms and their widespread adoption in software development highlighted the Object/Relational Impedance Mismatch, caused by the difference in approach between the paradigms. Nowadays, the use of mapping frameworks between the two approaches is state-of-the-practice due to the efficiency and security they provide for development. Thus, different frameworks of this type for different programming languages have been developed. And, even with a different syntax in each of them, it is possible to notice shared semantics. Therefore, in this work, we present the Object/Relational Mapping Ontology (ORM-O), a reference ontology in the ORM frameworks domain that aims to identify and represent the semantics of object/relational mapping. The ontology was developed following the SABiO method and modeled using OntoUML. Its evaluation was carried out through verification and validation activities, answering the competency questions previously raised and instantiating ontology concepts using object/relational mapping code snippets, using a very popular ORM framework. ORM-O was built within the scope of a project that aims to create a network of ontologies about software development frameworks. Such ontologies will allow us to automate semantic interoperability tasks, such as migrating code between frameworks, or specifying smells in software architecture independently of framework or language, for example. As a proof of concept, we also developed a migration tool that converts code from one ORM framework to another (on different platforms) using ORM-O as an interlingua.