The Information Retrieval System for Software Reuse

Abstract

In this paper, several problems functioning as the obstacles against software reuse were summarized. Among them, the issues dealt with in this paper include the effective method for constructing the library, the proper structure of the library, and the efficient retrieval technique. The knowledge-based approach and the information retrieval approach were integrated to construct and manage the library. The former is on the object-oriented model. Basically the object-oriented library is based on the classes and organized by inheritance. Because inheritance hierarchy is based on syntactical information, it dose not present the relationship of functionality. Using the information retrieval approach, the index file which characterizes the component and similarity among the components can be analyzed. Especially, we focused on the reusable library for the object-oriented programming environments.