Web applications are subject to continuous changes and rapid evolution triggered by increasing competition, especially in commercial domains such as electronic commerce. Unfortunately, usually they are implemented without producing any useful documentation for subsequent maintenance and evolution. Thereof, the maintenance of such systems becomes a challenging problem as the complexity of the Web application grows. Reverse engineering has been heralded as one of the most promising technologies to support effective Web application maintenance. This paper presents a reverse engineering approach that help understanding existing undocumented Web applications to be maintained or evolved. The proposed approach provides a set of rules to derive from domain ontology a conceptual schema modelling a Web application. The advantage of using ontology for conceptual data modelling is the reusability of domain knowledge. As a result, the conceptual data model will be made faster, easier and with fewer errors than creating it in usual way. Developers can use the extracted conceptual schema to gain a better understanding of web applications and to assist in their maintenance.
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