Web semantics and ontologies-based framework for software component selection from online repositories

Software development deals with larger design and development pressures and requires software system to be developed in a shorter period. A big problem encountered during software development is the inability to find and retrieve the required reusable components. One of the reasons behind this issue is the scarcity of sophisticated techniques and query methods. The primary challenge of effective component retrieval is to bridge the semantic gap between natural language and component description. In this paper, we proposed an approach that offers automatic retrieval of components by employing domain ontologies. It allows users to enter the query in natural language, and a semantic service format is used to treat software components as services. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can retrieve components for a given query accurately and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. This work also explores statistics for evaluating software components and finally discusses open challenges and future directions.