An Ontology-Driven Paradigm for Component Representation and Retrieval

Component-based software reuse is an important research topic in software engineering and is the basis of software product line. Many methods for representation and retrieval of components have been proposed and most of them are faceted-based or specification-based. There is no a uniform formulism for component representation and retrieval. In order to solve this problem, an ontology-based representation model for component and the retrieval algorithm based on this model are proposed. The key factors of component reuse are discussed and it is pointed out that component reuse is the reuse of knowledge about component. Component ontology is employed to represent the knowledge about component. Domain-specific terms are used to represent component by importing domain ontology into component ontology. Component retrieving algorithm is implemented by ontology query and reasoning. The model is used in a large scale distributed simulation system and the fact revealed that component ontology is flexible enough for component reuse and efficiency of retrieving algorithm is gratifying.