Software Component Repository Research Articles

Design of framework for ontological component retrieval from software component repositories

Modern component retrieval approaches are based on the context and domain of the software component in addition to using various classification and retrieval techniques like keyword search, attribute-based search and semantic search. This work proposes ontological retrieval framework for software components that makes the use of ontology for effective retrieval of components. Ontological component retrieval framework has been created to facilitate the users and developers to retrieve software components matching precisely to their needs. A well-framed set of queries ranging from little to specific knowledge about the component requirement has been used to validate the results.

Design of framework for ontological component retrieval from software component repositories

Modern component retrieval approaches are based on the context and domain of the software component in addition to using various classification and retrieval techniques like keyword search, attribute-based search and semantic search. This work proposes ontological retrieval framework for software components that makes the use of ontology for effective retrieval of components. Ontological component retrieval framework has been created to facilitate the users and developers to retrieve software components matching precisely to their needs. A well-framed set of queries ranging from little to specific knowledge about the component requirement has been used to validate the results.

Green factors of referential value-based software component repository

Green factors of referential value-based software component repository

Green factors of referential value-based software component repository

Reference-based green computing has different dimensions like time, cost, space etc. Time and space required by software system is dependent upon development process of the software and algorithm used during software development. In the referential software development system, new dimensions are coming into picture such as length of networks used, technology adopted in the network systems and response time of the middleware. The major objective of the paper is to provide the efficient reusability system for the green parameter. In this paper, all green parameters including new dimensions proposed in the referential software development process have been calculated. The proposed technique presents the mapping of addresses required to simulate referential software's in the cloud computing scenario. The proposed method increases the software reusability and reduce the cost and time.

Using Inhabitation in Bounded Combinatory Logic with Intersection Types for Composition Synthesis

We describe ongoing work on a framework for automatic composition synthesis from a repository of software components. This work is based on combinatory logic with intersection types. The idea is that components are modeled as typed combinators, and an algorithm for inhabitation {\textemdash} is there a combinatory term e with type tau relative to an environment Gamma? {\textemdash} can be used to synthesize compositions. Here, Gamma represents the repository in the form of typed combinators, tau specifies the synthesis goal, and e is the synthesized program. We illustrate our approach by examples, including an application to synthesis from GUI-components.

An Experiment in Software Component Retrieval based on Metadata and Ontology Repository

components to build a new software system. Effective storage and retrieval of software components is much essential in software components reuse process. The researchers have developed a number of software components reuse techniques for storage and retrieval of software components. No one technique is complete in its own; every technique has its own merits and demerits. This paper presents a meta-data model and faceted classification for storage and retrieval of software components that considers domain semantic information based on ontologies and texonomies. In contrast to most existing repositories, which only retrieve a limited set of components, the proposed meta-data model makes possible the recommendation of interrelated components, as ontology and taxonomies characteristics were incorporated. The software component retrieval based on facet classification is a method which has been widely applied in software component retrieval, but the precision of software component retrieval is poor as a result of subjective factor in faceted classification retrieval. The architecture of software component retrieval system and the model of software component retrieval system were designed, the corresponding match algorithm was provided. According to the relation of facet and term space, meta-data repository was established and abstracted from domain knowledge which formed coherent retrieval in the domain and was applied to software component retrieval process. These terms in the meta-data repository were then used to match software components which described in the software component description repository with facet classification, related software components were retrieved from the software component repository. The results of application show that the new software component retrieval method can evidently improve the component retrieval precision and take care of the full-scale of the searching results.

Automated classification and retrieval of reusable software components

AbstractThe authors describe their research which improves software reuse by using an automated approach to semantically search for and retrieve reusable software components in large software component repositories and on the World Wide Web (WWW). Using automation and smart (semantic) techniques, their approach speeds up the search and retrieval of reusable software components, while retaining good accuracy, and therefore improves the affordability of software reuse.A program understanding of software components and natural language understanding of user queries was employed. Then the software component descriptions were compared by matching the resulting semantic representations of the user queries to the semantic representations of the software components to search for software components that best match the user queries.A proof of concept system was developed to test the authors' approach. The results of this proof of concept system were compared to human experts, and statistical analysis was performed on the collected experimental data. The results from these experiments demonstrate that this automated semantic‐based approach for software reusable component classification and retrieval is successful when compared to the labor‐intensive results from the experts, thus showing that this approach can significantly benefit software reuse classification and retrieval.

Rascal: A Recommender Agent for Agile Reuse

As software organisations mature, their repositories of reusable software components from previous projects will also grow considerably. Remaining conversant with all components in such a repository presents a significant challenge to developers. Indeed the retrieval of a particular component in this large search space may prove problematic. Further to this, the reuse of components developed in an Agile environment is likely to be hampered by the existence of little or no support materials. We propose to infer the need for a component and proactively recommend that component to the developer using a technique which is consistent with the principles of Agile methodologies. Our RASCAL recommender agent tracks usage histories of a group of developers to recommend to an individual developer components that are expected to be needed by that developer. Unlike many traditional recommender systems, we may recommend items that the developer has actually employed previously. We introduce a content-based filtering technique for ordering the set of recommended software components and present a comparative analysis of applying this technique to a number of collaborative filtering algorithms. We also investigate the relationship between the number of usage histories collected and recommendation accuracy. Our overall results indicate that RASCAL is a very promising tool for allowing developers discover reusable components at no additional cost

AN RPCL-BASED INDEXING APPROACH FOR SOFTWARE COMPONENT CLASSIFICATION

Software Engineering is not only a technical discipline of its own, but also a problem domain where technologies coming from other disciplines are relevant and can play important roles. One important example is knowledge engineering, a term that is used in a broad sense to encompass artificial intelligence, computational intelligence, knowledge bases, data mining, and machine learning [13]. Many typical software development issues can benefit from these disciplines. For this reason, we will employ computational intelligence approach to classify software component repository into similar component cluster groups with the help of Rival Penalized Competitive Learning algorithm. The center of each cluster will be used to construct the coarse grain classification indexing structure. Subsequent retrieval requirements of software components are compared with all the indexed cluster centers. Any software components belonging to the cluster partition whose center is closest to the required software component will be retrieved and participated in selecting the most suitable software component at the fine grain level. This approach not only is suitable for multi-dimensional data, but also automatically decides the correct model classification.

Selecting reusable stand-alone routines: a proposal and a case study

Almost daily engineers write, mainly from scratch, ad hoc programs suitable to solve very specific problems. In order to provide assistance to engineers willing to develop their programs through white-box reuse, it is mandatory to offer them repositories of software components populated with stand-alone routines selected according to software metrics able to measure the code complexity. Our selection approach is inspired to that previously adopted by Caldiera and Basili in a well-known paper, indeed, we use the same classical metrics, namely: volume, cyclomatic complexity and regularity. In essence, this paper represents both a refinement and a replication of the experiment performed by Caldiera and Basili, being the domain of the software investigated and the structure of the software itself the two major differences. In order to carry out the experiment, it was necessary to adapt the extremes of the values of the metrics mentioned above to our reference context which is very different from that Caldiera and Basili referred to. The adaptation was not trivial because in the case of routines being part of software libraries it is not possible to proceed as they did. In this paper, a general strategy suitable to “calibrate” their original reusability model is given. To validate the proposal, the strategy is instantiated to the domain of mathematical software. By referring to the calibrated reusability model, we carried out a large scale empirical investigation in order to select candidate reusable stand-alone ( Fortran) routines from two commercial libraries belonging to the mathematical domain totally adding up to 2500 routines. The second part of the paper reports about such an experiment.

Information access tools for software reuse

Software reuse has long been touted as an effective means to develop software products. But reuse technologies for software have not lived up to expectations. Among the barriers are high costs of building software repositories and the need for effective tools to help designers locate reusable software. Although many design-for-reuse and software classification efforts have been proposed, these methods are cost-intensive and cannot effectively take advantage of large stores of design artifacts that many development organizations have accumulated. Methods are needed that take advantage of these valuable resources in a cost-effective manner. This article describes an approach to the design of tools to help software designers build repositories of software components and locate potentially reusable software in those repositories. The approach is investigated with a retrieval tool, named CodeFinder, which supports the process of retrieving software components when information needs are ill-defined and users are not familiar with vocabulary used in the repository. CodeFinder uses an innovative integration of tools for the incremental refinement of queries and a retrieval mechanism that finds information associatively related to a query. Empirical evaluation of CodeFinder has demonstrated the effectiveness of the approach.

Acquisition, organisation and reuse of software design knowledge

The paper addresses the acquisition, organisation and reuse of knowledge in the design of real-time software systems. Experiences from capturing and making explicit software design alternatives and their selection criteria are evaluated. Generic, software design task-specific and domain-specific types of knowledge are discussed and illustrated using real-life design examples. A prototype of a CASE tool is also described, which incorporates a repository of reusable software components as a source of design alternatives and assists a designer both in selecting them and in analysing the results.