3:30 - 4:30 Dr. Jim Cordy :
When is a clone not a clone? (and vice-versa)
Abstract -
Software clones are fragments of code or other artifacts that are copied or
repeated in source text. Clones have a significant effect
on software development and
maintenance, and as a result clone detection, analysis and management has
become a popular research topic in software engineering.
However, there is a class
of languages for which clone detectors perform very poorly, and in fact return
results that are either incomplete, uninteresting
or downright incorrect. In this
talk I will introduce one such language,
the Web Services Description Language.
I will explain why implicit assumptions made by clone detectors cause them to
do very poorly in analysis of similarities in this and other modelling
languages,
and how we can resolve the problem by taking context into account. I will
demonstrate our results by applying the new method to the problem of web services
personalization, and show how it generalizes to semantic methods such as LDA.
James Cordy is Professor and past Director of the School of Computing at
Queen's
University. As leader of the
TXL source transformation project with hundreds
of academic and industrial users worldwide, he is the author of more than 130
refereed contributions in programming languages, software engineering and
artificial
intelligence. Dr. Cordy is an ACM Distinguished Scientist, a senior member
of the IEEE, and an IBM visiting scientist and faculty fellow.
This is joint work with PhD student Douglas Martin and post-doctoral
fellow Scott
Grant, funded in part by NSERC, OGS and IBM Canada.