An Ontology-Based Reuse Approach for Information Systems Engineering

Abstract

In the world-wide web context, availability of software components increases the possibility of applying a reuse approach in software development. Thus, component retrieval is a key problem, both for software industry and for end-users, moreover for open source community which uses more and more components-based software engineering approaches.The OMG has defined a unified framework for reusable items (so-called ¿assets¿) descriptions. Even if this framework supports description of a large variety of components, it reduces retrieval aspects to keywords search without considering user¿s profile and user¿s need within the current task. We believe that the retrieval difficulty is related to the crucial problem of interaction between component providers and users (i.e. the consumers). This interaction can be supported and even automated by increasing the expressiveness of the language used for encoding component properties and formulating queries, enhancing therefore the quality of the retrieval. In this research, we propose to use common ontologies for representing user¿s profiles, user¿s needs and semantic knowledge of the components. These ontologies also support reasoning on components and matching of provided and required components. The approach makes use of business domain ontologies and ontology of the domain of information system engineering. The paper describes how these ontologies can be used both at design time for asset descriptions and user¿s profiles definition and at reuse time for matching user¿s requirements, user¿s profiles and asset descriptors.