An information retrieval common service based on H-PCTE

Information retrieval (IR) problems occur frequently in software development. All sorts of software documents can be involved. In software development environments which are based on file systems, IR problems are usually solved using tools which search keywords in text files. Such tools are no longer applicable if the environment is based an object management system (OMS) since, in an OMS, a document is typically stored in the form of a network of objects and relationships. OMSs do not usually provide IR facilities. This work presents an approach on how to extend an OMS (such as the OMS of PCTE) by basic IR operations. This set of operations is designed in such a way that it conforms to the concept of an open framework of environments. It can be used to construct independent IR tools and IR commands within editors and other tools. Its main features are: (a) a standardized query language which can, in the same way like a view, abstract from a concrete database schema; (b) a simple method to assess each object found in a query; (c) display of query results; and (d) indexing