Dr. Andrew Broad
Computer Science
PhD Project

These pages serve as auxiliary appendices to my PhD thesis, which is entitled Comparative Code Understanding of Information Models. Click here for an explanation of comparative code understanding.

The practical product of this research is a comparative code-understanding system (CCUS), which compares two given EXPRESS models, inferring correspondences and reporting differences. The CCUS assesses whether two corresponding constraints are semantically equivalent, or whether one is semantically stronger than the other. When the CCUS cannot see at the code level that two constraints are semantically equivalent, it may do so by extracting and comparing higher-level constraints (HLCs), which characterise the abstract semantics of the constraints on the models.

The CCUS builds on the code-understanding system that I built for my MPhil, which extracts HLCs from a given EXPRESS model.

The CCUS is built on top of a frame system. This provides a data-driven environment in which objects (the EXPRESS models, HLCs and cases) are represented as frames. EXPRESS itself is used as the frame-class language, and I have invented my own frame-instance language, FIL.

The Thesis itself

The Frame-Class Model

The Case Library (zipped - see index.html)

Source Code (zipped - see index.html)

Javadoc Documentation (zipped - see doc.html)

Experimental Results