A Representation Model for Reusable Assets To Support User Context

In the field of software reuse, several methods for storage and retrieval of assets abound. However, these methods often find their limits; they fail to turn up the suitable reusable assets that satisfy the needs of a particular software system under development. Two problems are the root cause of this situation. One is the lack of accurate semantics for describing software assets. The other is the ignorance of the user query context. In such a context, this paper presents an XML-based asset representation model for describing all kinds of software asset that can be reused within software development process. The proposed model provides semantic metadata for describing assets oriented user context in order to build the foundation for semantic reasoning in the retrieval process.