An Ontology-Based Support for Asset Design and Reuse

In the World-Wide Web context, availability of software components increases the possibility of applying a reuse approach in software development. Thus, component retrieval is a key problem, both for software industry and for end-users. Several problems should be solved: components formalisms are very different from one source to another, knowledge for guiding components retrieval is often poor and search process often misses. In this research, we propose to unify components formalisms and, then, to encapsulate components in a semantic layer. This layer, called ldquoasset Srdquo, aims at describing semantically software components for guiding their retrieval. We also introduce a search process based on exploitation of this semantic layer. Our proposal is based both on ontologies and user profiles. We think those concepts can increase efficiently the pairing of available software components and userspsila queries expressed during information systems design by reuse.