VISON: An Ontology-Based Approach for Software Visualization Tool Discoverability
This addresses the problem of tool discoverability for software practitioners and researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing literature by curating and organizing tools into an ontology.
The authors tackled the problem of low adoption of software visualization tools by creating VISON, an ontology-based catalog of 70 tools to help practitioners discover suitable tools based on characteristics like supported concerns and maturity, with early results showing support for developers and researchers in tool selection and experiment design.
Although many tools have been presented in the research literature of software visualization, there is little evidence of their adoption. To choose a suitable visualization tool, practitioners need to analyze various characteristics of tools such as their supported software concerns and level of maturity. Indeed, some tools can be prototypes for which the lifespan is expected to be short, whereas others can be fairly mature products that are maintained for a longer time. Although such characteristics are often described in papers, we conjecture that practitioners willing to adopt software visualizations require additional support to discover suitable visualization tools. In this paper, we elaborate on our efforts to provide such support. To this end, we systematically analyzed research papers in the literature of software visualization and curated a catalog of 70 available tools that employ various visualization techniques to support the analysis of multiple software concerns. We further encapsulate these characteristics in an ontology. VISON, our software visualization ontology, captures these semantics as concepts and relationships. We report on early results of usage scenarios that demonstrate how the ontology can support (i) developers to find suitable tools for particular development concerns, and (ii) researchers who propose new software visualization tools to identify a baseline tool for a controlled experiment.