Enhancing Asset Search and Retrieval in a Services Repository using Consumption Contexts

Software organizations wanting to implement a systematic reuse program face the challenge of organizing and cataloging their software assets so that they can be retrieved in different contexts of usage across their divisions. With the advent of services-oriented architectures (SOA), of which Web services is an example, software components are readily available as services on the web using standard protocols. However, service descriptions are usually only those that are provided by the service producers and unless a service producer has thought about all the contexts in which its service may be used, there is no guarantee that the service can be retrieved with high recall. In this paper, we investigate how different contexts of asset consumption may be used for better asset modeling and discovery. We introduce an extensible set of consumption factors where the service descriptions may be provided by the service producer or other roles, implement a prototype that can evolve with the modeled factors, and demonstrate that the solution enables improved precision and recall for services available in a large-scale software organization.