Lab49 Semantic Web London meetup on July 17th. Survol is Primhill Computer's Software Intelligence tool to analyse and investigate running applications and legacy information systems in-situ. It is based on RDF and CIM.

1. Exploring LegacyWare with RDF
and Survol
How Semantic Web helps Software Archeology
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2. Legacy software is growing.
• Massive code base: Millions of LOCs
• Non-existent / obsolete / false documentation
• Long history: 20 years +. Still growing
• More interconnections between systems
• Multiple hardware, languages, architectures, interfaces
Companies cannot rebuild their Information System from scratch: They
just clone it piece by piece; It grows, organically.
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3. Understanding legacy software: Solutions
• Documentation.
• Static analysis tools.
• Consultants, reading the code
• Models: UML
• Reverse engineering tools: Rational Rose
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4. No easy way to reverse-engineer IT systems
There is no methodology to investigate an Information System:
• Methodologies only work for simple systems
• Reverse-engineering tools have no understanding of the application
• Systems are constantly evolving: Only in-vivo investigation can
accurately describe a system when it is updated.
• No semantic definition, no model: The only common language
between machine and users, are IT objects.
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5. Self-updated maps of IT systems
• Tim Berners-Lee: «I have a dream for the Web in which computers
become capable of analysing all the data on the web». Semantic Web
models navigation on semantic resources. A machines network, eb, as
opposed to static documentation, is constantly up-to-date.
• These semantic resources are modelled by CIM: Common Information
Model. CIM is the abstract ontology.
• RDF: Resource Description Framework provides the mechanism and
the knowledge representation.
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6. CIM / Common Information Model ?
A DMTF open standard defining how IT elements are represented as a common set of objects and
relationships. Implemented by WBEM (Web-Based Enterprise Management), it provides queries on
machine and software state.
Class CIM_Process : CIM_LogicalElement {
string Name;
datetime CreationDate;
uint32 Priority;
string Handle;
}
• WMI (Windows™ Management Instrumentation)
• OpenLMI for Linux
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7. RDF + CIM = Information System dynamic models
• CIM is an object-based industrial definition of IT resources,
standardised by DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force).
• RDF provides the semantic model:
Subject.Predicate = Object  (Subject,Predicate,Object)
RDF triples and URIs aggregate data from and link to heterogeneous
information sources.
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8. Survol: Browsing IT resources
• Models IT resources with CIM model and RDF implementation:
CIM_Process, CIM_DataFile, CIM_ComputerSystem … (Dozens !)
• Model enrichment with simple Python scripts
• HTML, Json, RDF, SVG, Javascript/D3 output
• Python 2/3, Windows/Linux. IE, Firefox, Chrome.
• Dozens of toolbox scripts for interrogating a running machine, all
wrapped in CIM/RDF framework: netstat, ps, ldd, nmap, ping, strace,
ltrace, gdb, depends, smbclient, tcpdump, etc… now usable by
anyone, results visible by anyone.
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9. Browsing IT resources on a local machine
• Process tree
• Python module dependencies
• Shared libraries and their symbols
• Process memory parsing
• Kernel module dependencies
• Installed software
• COM components
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10. PyCharm on Windows (D3)
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11. Oracle on Linux (SVG)
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12. Numpy Python package (HTML)
numpy Condition_pandas [('>=', '1.9.0')]
Condition_scipy [('>=', '1.8.2')]
Condition_tensorboard [('>=', '1.12.0')]
Condition_tensorflow [('>=', '1.13.3')]
apache
vps516494.ovh.net
Location site-packages/
Package __init__.pyc
Platform None
Version 1.14.3
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13. System-wide shared-memory (D3)
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14. Browsing distributed applications
• Sockets between processes: By drag’n’dropping RDF uris, one can
display processes of several machines, in the same browser.
• Remote Oracle database: socket connection, tables
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15. SSH socket from Win10 to RedHat
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16. Remote Oracle connection
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17. Oracle schema: RDF
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rdf:RDF
xmlns:ns1="http://primhillcomputers.com/ontologies/"
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
>
<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://DESKTOP-
NI99V8E:8000/survol/entity.py?xid=oracle/table.Db=XE_OVH,Schema=APEX_040000,Table=WWV_FLOW_DUAL100">
<ns1:Status>VALID</ns1:Status>
<ns1:Creation rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime">2011-08-28T22:23:24</ns1:Creation>
</rdf:Description>
<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://DESKTOP-
NI99V8E:8000/survol/entity.py?xid=oracle/table.Db=XE_OVH,Schema=APEX_040000,Table=WWV_FLOW_TEMP_TABLE">
<ns1:Creation rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime">2011-08-28T22:23:24</ns1:Creation>
<ns1:Status>VALID</ns1:Status>
</rdf:Description>
<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://DESKTOP-
NI99V8E:8000/survol/entity.py?xid=oracle/schema.Db=XE_OVH,Schema=APEX_040000">
<ns1:table rdf:resource="http://DESKTOP-
NI99V8E:8000/survol/entity.py?xid=oracle/table.Db=XE_OVH,Schema=APEX_040000,Table=WWV_FLOW_DUAL100"/>
<ns1:table rdf:resource="http://DESKTOP-
NI99V8E:8000/survol/entity.py?xid=oracle/table.Db=XE_OVH,Schema=APEX_040000,Table=WWV_FLOW_TEMP_TABLE"/>
</rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>
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18. Future directions
• Plug an RDF inference engine: Protégé, Jena
• Store RDF triples in a distributed database, for reporting and analysis.
• More scripts for investigating new resources types: APIs, software,
databases etc… WQL queries.
• Process mining, i.e. the analysis of business processes based on event
logs; This concept also applies to the many technical log files on a
running system.
• Jupyter Notebook integration
• SPARQL integration
• WSGI hosting for real-time events capture
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