CDIF as the Interchange Format between Reengineering Tools

Tool support is recognised as a key issue in the reengineering of large scale object-oriented systems. However, due to the heterogeneity in today's object-oriented programming languages, it is hard to reuse reengineering tools across legacy systems. This paper proposes a language independent exchange model, so that tools may perform their tasks independent of the underlying programming language. We have adopted CDIF as the basis for the exchange of information, using this model, between the reengineering tool prototypes in the FAMOOS project. The main reasons for adopting CDIF are, that firstly it is an industry standard, and secondly it has a standard plain text encoding which tackles the requirements of convenient querying and human readability. Next to that the CDIF framework supports the extensibility we need to define our model and language plug-ins.