Universität Koblenz-Landau
Institut für Informatik
Rheinau 1
D-56075 Koblenz
Germany
This paper describes ongoing work toward the development of a standard software exchange format (SEF), for exchanging information among tools that analyze computer programs. The goal is to allow these tools to easily exchange information, and thereby to allow more and better software analysis tools to be produced and to avoid building and re-building certain kinds of tools such as extractors, manipulators, and analyzers. A particular exchange format called GXL (Graph Exchange Language) is proposed. GXL originates in the GraX SEF for exchanging TGraphs (from the University of Koblenz), combined with the TA exchange format (from the Uni-versity of Waterloo). In turn, GXL has been defined for use in the PROGRES graph manipulation system (from RWTH Aachen and University Bw. Munich). TA in turn can be thought of as a generalization of the RSF SEF (from the University of Victoria). Since TA, TGraphs, and RSF together are widely used in the software re-engineering research community, it is hoped that this merging of notations will be attractive for general adoption. Since TA, TGraphs and PROGRES have the same underlying mathematical formalism (typed, attributed, directed graphs), it has been straightforward to combine these SEFs. Since they have been successfully used in the analysis of many large systems, including Linux, Mozilla and industrial software from IBM, MITEL, and Volksfürsorge, and has been used for various source languages and for various levels of analysis (from the AST level to the architectural level), it is expected that GXL will gracefully scale up to industrial software. Since GXL encodes general graph structures, it is useful for the wide class of tools, not necessarily re-engineering tools, that are based on graphs.
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