Component Retrieval Using Conversational Case-Based Reasoning

Component retrieval, about how to locate and identify appropriate components, is one of the major problems in component reuse. It becomes more critical as more reusable components come from component markets instead of from an in-house component library, and the number of available components is dramatically increasing. In this paper, we review the current component retrieval methods and propose our conversational component retrieval model (CCRM). In CCRM, components are represented as cases, a knowledge-intensive case-based reasoning (CBR) method is adopted to explore context-based semantic similarities between users‟ query and stored components, and a conversational case-based reasoning (CCBR) technology is selected to acquire users‟ requirements interactively and incrementally.