Semantic annotation, publication, and discovery of Java software components: an integrated approach

Component-based software development has matured into standard practice in software engineering. Among the advantages of reusing software modules are lower costs, faster development, more manageable code, increased productivity, and improved software quality. As the number of available software components has grown, so has the need for effective component search and retrieval. Traditional search approaches, such as keyword matching, have proved ineffective when applied to software components. Applying a semantically- enhanced approach to component classification, publication, and discovery can greatly increase the efficiency of searching and retrieving software components. This has been already applied in the context of Web technologies, and Web services in particular, in the frame of Semantic Web Services research. This paper examines the similarities between software components and Web services and adapts an existing Semantic Web Service publication and discovery solution into a software component annotation and discovery tool which is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in

A new way to classify and retrieve reusable components: the finder metaphor

Our research group ISRI (InCormation Syslems Reuse on Internet) is working in a new classification scheme for reusable software (assets) based on the idea of hyper-spherical finders. The Finder metaphor deals with a multidimensional space where the components are positioned according to its functional description. and vision fields. hiper-spheres, which can move in space and see the components. Our approach has some advantages over other techniques and methodologies, for example: we start with an empty space (the universe) and automatically fill it with reusable assets, which describe the application domain, but the space itself is dynamically generated as components are inserted; furthermore, we can build different finders, alter its radius or its kind of movement, without the need of reclassifying the repository, allowing a dynamical classification. We developed and tested a simple but practical method to compute similarities, allowing to locate assets in this kind of universe, generating finders and modifying them, querying the universe and retrieving similar components. The tested values of recall and precision were similar or better than other known methods but ours is by far easier to implement and maintain. An extensive list of references about reuse and classificationlretrieval problem. where interested readers can investigate more deeply is offered.Eje: Ingeniería del software. Computación gráfica y visualizaciónRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Un environnement de spécification et de découverte pour la réutilisation des composants logiciels dans le développement des logiciels distribués

Notre travail vise à élaborer une solution efficace pour la découverte et la réutilisation des composants logiciels dans les environnements de développement existants et couramment utilisés. Nous proposons une ontologie pour décrire et découvrir des composants logiciels élémentaires. La description couvre à la fois les propriétés fonctionnelles et les propriétés non fonctionnelles des composants logiciels exprimées comme des paramètres de QoS. Notre processus de recherche est basé sur la fonction qui calcule la distance sémantique entre la signature d'un composant et la signature d'une requête donnée, réalisant ainsi une comparaison judicieuse. Nous employons également la notion de " subsumption " pour comparer l'entrée-sortie de la requête et des composants. Après sélection des composants adéquats, les propriétés non fonctionnelles sont employées comme un facteur distinctif pour raffiner le résultat de publication des composants résultats. Nous proposons une approche de découverte des composants composite si aucun composant élémentaire n'est trouvé, cette approche basée sur l'ontologie commune. Pour intégrer le composant résultat dans le projet en cours de développement, nous avons développé l'ontologie d'intégration et les deux services " input/output convertor " et " output Matching ".Our work aims to develop an effective solution for the discovery and the reuse of software components in existing and commonly used development environments. We propose an ontology for describing and discovering atomic software components. The description covers both the functional and non functional properties which are expressed as QoS parameters. Our search process is based on the function that calculates the semantic distance between the component interface signature and the signature of a given query, thus achieving an appropriate comparison. We also use the notion of "subsumption" to compare the input/output of the query and the components input/output. After selecting the appropriate components, the non-functional properties are used to refine the search result. We propose an approach for discovering composite components if any atomic component is found, this approach based on the shared ontology. To integrate the component results in the project under development, we developed the ontology integration and two services " input/output convertor " and " output Matching "