Research Of A Semantic-based Approach To Component Description And Retrieval

Software reuse is one of hotspots in the field of computer software research and development. It can increase software quality and developer productivity, decrease the cost of development and maintenance. Large scale software reuse needs a number of components. However, the management of these components, which includes classification and retrieval of component, is a key technology in software reuse. The effective reuse depends on precise and complete description about properties of component consist of attributes and behaviors, and well retrieval approach as well. After investigating and analyzing current technologies on the description and retrieval to component and their problems, in the thesis, a semantic-based approach to component description and retrieval is presented, particularly the semantics is referred to the meaning of service provided by component in specific domain. The approach to organize, describe and retrieve component based on service semantics provided by domain ontology is investigated and discussed. The natural language query interface, domain ontology and reusable repository are implemented in a prototype, and the feasibility and usefulness of the proposed approach are validated by the prototype in some domains. Main contributions in the thesis are:1. It investigates domain ontology containing domain terms, their definitions, and relationships with other domain-specific terms, which is described by OWL(Web Ontology Language). OWL defines concepts and relationships among concepts explicitly and formally. So OWL can explicitly define function semantics of component in the level of ontology and provide semantics to description and retrieval of component.2. It investigates a semantic-based description method of component. In the method, interface is independent of component, which supportsflexible extensible and substitutable characteristics to component.Services of component are described by domain ontology, which providesemantics of service in the domain. Description language based on OWL isproposed.3. It investigates a semantic-based domain knowledge-aided retrievalapproach to component. In the approach, user can specify query in naturallanguage, which yields a flexible and convenient search. User' s queryare augmented and refined by utilizing the domain knowledge embedded indomain ontology and thesaurus.