An Experiment in Software Component Retrieval based on Metadata and Ontology Repository

Abstract

Software component reuse is the use of existing software components to build a new software system. Effective storage and retrieval of software components is much essential in software components reuse process. The researchers have developed a number of software components reuse techniques for storage and retrieval of software components. No one technique is complete in its own; every technique has its own merits and demerits. This paper presents a meta-data model and faceted classification for storage and retrieval of software components that considers domain semantic information based on ontologies and texonomies. In contrast to most existing repositories, which only retrieve a limited set of components, the proposed meta-data model makes possible the recommendation of interrelated components, as ontology and taxonomies characteristics were incorporated. The software component retrieval based on facet classification is a method which has been widely applied in software component retrieval, but the precision of software component retrieval is poor as a result of subjective factor in faceted classification retrieval. The architecture of software component retrieval system and the model of software component retrieval system were designed, the corresponding match algorithm was provided. According to the relation of facet and term space, meta-data repository was established and abstracted from domain knowledge which formed coherent retrieval in the domain and was applied to software component retrieval process. These terms in the meta-data repository were then used to match software components which described in the software component description repository with facet classification, related software components were retrieved from the software component repository. The results of application show that the new software component retrieval method can evidently improve the component retrieval precision and take care of the full-scale of the searching results.

A Neural Network based Method to Optimize the Software Component Searching Results in K-Model

“…The use case diagram MDL file format contains valuable information about the requirements specification of the software, i.e. it contains use cases, actors, and their relationships [7]. If we search the repository on the basis of attributes of MDL file descriptions, the search result would be better and thus giving higher precision, as compared to keyword based search.…”

“…Software component reuse is an important concept to software development, as it reduces software development effort, time and cost and increase reliability, productivity, throughput and flexibility. Software component-Based Software Engineering proposes the reuse of software components, which can be retrieved and assembled into applications of specific domains [1,2,7]. In order to build these applications successfully, it is fundamental to choose appropriated software components from a collection of available software components.…”

“…A technique to software component repositories is needed that provides the retrieval and recommendation of semantically interrelated software components. Reusing UML diagrams and source codes can help reduce development effort [7] [9]. A search engine can be developed that can help in reusing the existing UML components, software component design, source codes, test cases and maintenance case.…”

“…While libraries of Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams and source codes do exist, one of the challenges that still remain is to locate suitable designs and source codes, and adapt them to meet the specific requirements of the software designer and developer. Traditional approaches to component retrieval are keyword-based; which resulted in the retrieval of many irrelevant components [7] [10]. A more promising approach is retrieval based on MDL format, where the contents of MDL file of the UML diagrams are matched to retrieve the software components.…”

“…If we search the repository on the basis of attributes of MDL file descriptions, the search result would be better and thus giving higher precision, as compared to keyword based search. Then apply neural network to improve the searching results [7] [19].…”