Integration of descriptors for software component retrieval

Software component retrieval is an important task in software reuse; after all, components must be found before they can be reused. In this paper, we propose the use of compound index to integrate two types of information (i.e functional and structural) that are used to represent a component in a component retrieval system. The proposed mechanism is flexible as it can be expanded to include additional information extracted from a software component. In order to retrieve components that are relevant to a given query, similarity measurement based on vector model and data distribution were performed. Experiments of program retrieval undertaken using existing approach (function-based) and the combination approach were also performed