A Search Method for Components Based-on XML Component Specification

Recently, the component technology has played a main role in software reuse. It has changed the code-based reuse into the binary code-based reuse, because components can be easily combined into the developing software only through component interfaces. Since components and component users have increased rapidly, it is necessary that the users of components search for the most proper components for HTML among the enormous number of components on the Internet. It is desirable to use web-document-typed specifications for component specifications on the Internet. This paper proposes to use XML component specifications instead of HTML specifications, because it is impossible to represent the semantics of contexts using HTML. We also propose the XML context-search method based on XML component specifications. Component users use the contexts for the component properties and the terms for the values of component properties in their queries for searching components. The index structure for the context-based search method is the inverted file indexing structure of term-context-component specification. Not only an XML context-based search method but also a variety of search methods based on context-based search, such as keyword, search, faceted search, and browsing search method, are provided for the convenience of users. We use the 3-layer architecture, with an interface layer, a query expansion layer, and an XML search engine layer, of the search engine for the efficient index scheme. In this paper, an XML DTD(Document Type Definition) for component specification is defined and the experimental results of comparing search performance of XML with HTML are discussed.