Heuristics for Maintaining Term Structures for Relaxed Search

Abstract

The ESPRIT project REBOOT addresses software reuse from a large library of object-oriented components. A faceted classification scheme with structured term spaces is used to provide relaxed search, in order to find the most appropriate candidates for reuse according to the users’ requests.

We envision that one of the main problems with reuse based on a large component library will be the maintenance of this library, not just in terms of the quality of the individual components, but even more in terms of the library structure. With our approach, one of the most important tasks of the librarian will be to maintain the term spaces, which will have to undergo almost continuous change due to the quick evolution of the software component domain. In this paper, we suggest some heuristics for assisting the librarian with the term space maintenance. Although suggested specifically for reuse libraries, we believe that much of these heuristics will be applicable in a wider information retrieval context.