Knowledge representation for program reuse

In recent years, programs and knowledge about programs have become an important part of the "patrimony" (or intellectual property) of companies. However, the scope of this knowledge is wider than the simple code sources. In order to manage this knowledge it is necessary to model it. We propose a novel framework to encompass such knowledge. In this framework, we have defined a general ontology for program management and a knowledge description language, for documenting, modelling, and capitalising on the knowledge about the use of code. The paper presents the concepts of the ontology, their concrete representation in the language and some utilisations by different inference mechanisms.