Intelligent search agent for software components

Component software is one of the most promising methods for software reuse. The tremendous increase in the use of the World Wide Web (WWW) has accelerated the opening of reuse repositories on the Internet. However, existing document search engines are not usable for software components on the WWW because they usually conduct HTML-based keyword searches. In this paper, we describe an intelligent search agent system for components on the WWW. The agent has intelligence features such as preference, reasoning and learning. In order to improve the search performance and the user convenience, we adopted several progressive technologies and XML with rich semantics