Technical forum: Using logical data models for understanding and transforming legacy business applications

To date, IBM Research has been investigating tools and techniques for analyzing and transforming legacy business applications. Such applications are difficult to update in a timely manner in response to new business requirements due to several factors including the volume of code in a typical application, deterioration of the logical structure of code, functional redundancy, the structure of code reflects the dated technology on which it was built and the scarcity of technical skills. Addressing these concerns, IBM initiated the Mastery Project with the aim of creating data-centered modeling tools and to develop the algorithmic foundations for model extraction. Currently, Mastery consists of two distinct threads: research on novel algorithms for extracting logical data models; and development of an interactive tool, the Mastery Modeling Tool (MMT), for extracting logical models from COBOL applications and for querying and manipulating these models.