Reformulating Component Identification as Document Analysis Problem

Abstract

One of the first steps of component procurement is the identification of required component features in large repositories of existing components. On the highest level of abstraction, component requirements as well as component descriptions are usually written in natural language. Therefore, we can reformulate component identification as a text analysis problem and apply latent semantic analysis for automatically identifying suitable existing components in large repositories, based on the descriptions of required component features. In this article, we motivate our choice of this technique for feature identification, describe how it can be applied to feature tracing problems, and discuss the results that we achieved with the application of this technique in a number of case studies. Paper accepted for publication in ICSOFT 2007, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Software and Data Technologies, Volume SE, Barcelona, Spain, July 22-25, 2007.Software TechnologyElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc