AN ASSOCIATION-BASED MANAGEMENT OF REUSABLE SOFTWARE COMPONENTS

Processes to use environments which store reusable software components can be classified into ''registration'' (representation) and ''retrie val'' (remembering) processes. A conceptual space called ''reuse space '' is introduced which consists of the presentations of software entit ies and predicates to define the properties which the target entity sh ould satisfy. The predicate parts are implemented by property definiti ons for entities, described with the language called HSML, and associa tive networks. The associative network is structured with using a psyc hological principle called category-based induction. In the registrati on processes, nodes and links, which represent the new entity and the relationships with existing nodes, can be added to the associative net works. In the retrieval processes, the target entity can be remembered by searching the highest rating cluster in the associative networks w ith the aid of an inference engine. Clustering is performed with the u se of coverages and proximities attached to the links in the network. The environment called MANDALA consists of user interfaces for display ing the reuse space on the client stations, a central web server and m any distributed local servers which mount the contents of reusable com ponents.