A Formal Model for Integrated Retrieval from Software Libraries

The central problem associated with libraries of object-oriented software components is that of retrieval: how to nd in the library those components that can be used in the construction of a particular application. Approaches to this problem can be classiied into three categories based upon the way components are represented: external classiication, structural matching and behavioural. The aim of the research described in this paper is to unify these existing approaches to the component retrieval problem into a formally speciied object-oriented framework, providing a model enabling comparison and description of integrated retrieval schemes.