Stemming anomaly propagation in software systems using ontology

Abstract

The increasing use of information and communication technology over the last decade has driven a new range of information needs in business. A number of these software systems in deployment, however, suffer from detrimental unintended integrity and consistency compromise due to anomaly infestation. Primarily, the effects of this usually culminate in unpredictable and catastrophic results, which must be adequately checked to yield highly dependable software. This paper proposes a unified framework for analyzing propagations of anomalies in software systems employing ontology to characterize, categorize, and identify these errors; also, to provide guidelines for the implementation of the proposed solution. The generic approach captures the conventional semantics and structure of different types of anomalies with the notion of anomaly ontology. The prototype Ontology-based Software Anomaly Propagation Detection System (OBSAPDS) was built with the Protege 4.3 knowledge acquisition tool, and Java programming languagPe was used for the development of the application and MySQL Server as the back en--gine. The combination of the domain ontology in Protege and inference rules in Jena formed the knowledge system for the elicitation and the validation of domain facts. Besides, a proof-of-concept evaluation of the proposed framework confirmed how efficiently the approach could discover and resolve anomalies for different types of systems through demonstration. The division by zero error and the read access to uninitialized error conditions served as case studies.Keywords: Ontology, software systems, anomaly propagation