Abstract

this paper adopts a language of limited expressiveness, privileging the simplicity of use as the most important requirement. We adopt a very simple graph structure for representing both queries and component data, but -- differently from most of current systems -- we do not assume the user to have familiarity with the vocabulary used for component encoding, relying on a large linguistic ontology like Sensus [Swartout et al. 1996] to perform the match between queries and data. In the encoding phase (which we assume to be a manual process supported by an interactive environment), a software analyst describes a component by a simple graph where nodes and arcs are labelled with English words. Since binary relations are not usually denoted by nouns, a special semantics is adopted for this graph, which is called Lexical Semantic Graph. English nouns appearing in the graph are recognized by a lexical interface based on Wordnet [Miller 1995], which asks the analyst to choose among possibly different senses associated to each word. The graph of words is therefore translated into a graph of senses, each one corresponding to a node in the Sensus ontology. The query graph is built by the user in a similar way, but the words chosen and the corresponding senses can be of course different, as well as the structure of the graph. Conceptually, the search process implements a graph matching algorithm, returning the identifiers of all components whose description is subsumed by the query. In the following section, we describe the main design choices of a project on software retrieval currently going on at Corinto 1 , a research consortium established to study and promote object-oriented technology. In section 3 we present the encoding and retrieval process in some detail, with the help of...

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