Component search and reuse: An ontology-based approach

Abstract

In order to realize the full potential of software reuse, effective search techniques are indeed essential. In this paper, we propose a semantic-based approach for retrieving relevant components from a reuse repository. This approach utilizes an ontology model that includes a source-code ontology, a component ontology, and a domain-specific ontology. Due to the indexing and knowledge population mechanisms we used, our approach supports various kinds of search techniques. However, our experiments show evidence that only pure semantic search that exploits domain knowledge tends to improve precision.