XML-based software component retrieval with partial and reference matching

In software development, it is very desirable that existing software components can be reused that meet the user's specifications. A great amount of software components, or software objects, exist in some libraries or repositories, but finding the ones that can be reused for an application is a challenging task. The main objective is to find a match between the required specifications with those components in the library, with certain measures for the goodness of the match. In this paper, we propose a software component retrieval method and a system that deals with exact, partial, and reference (i.e. inheritance) matching. All software specifications are represented in XML.