Mining the Conceptual Model of Open Source CMS Using a Reverse Engineering Approach

Abstract

Model-driven engineering has become the emerging standard for software development focusing on the use of models as first-class citizens. One possible field of application of such model-driven approaches can be the open source Content Management Systems (CMS) domain. Typically, CMS are built using the source-code-oriented software development process raising issues related to usability, performance and other qualities of service in an application’s lifecycle. To overcome these issues, the use of model-driven approaches in the development of CMS-based web applications (WAs) can be particular beneficial.To this end, we propose a model-driven reverse engineering approach for automatic mining of the conceptual model of existing WAs developed using the widely used CMS Joomla! by applying data mining techniques. This methodology can be used to form the cornerstone of an evaluation framework for Joomla!-based WAs either in the design or maintenance process.