A Representation Model for Reusable Assets to Support User Context

In the field of software reuse, methods for storage and retrieval of software assets abound. However, these methods have limitations and fail to find the suitable reusable components or software assets that satisfy the requirements of a particular software system. We identify two problems to be the leading cause of this situation. One is the lack of accurate semantics for describing software assets. The other is the ignorance of user context in the query. In this paper we present an XML-based asset representation model which incorporates the user contextual information into the description of software assets that can be reused in the software development process. The proposed model provides semantic metadata for the user context in the asset description in order to build the foundation for semantic reasoning in the retrieval process.