Managing the usage experience in a library of software components

The users of libraries of object-oriented software components face with both a terminological and a cognitive gap. Usually, library users do not understand the vocabulary used in the library documentation, and they do not know some of the concepts involved in the solutions implemented by the components. In order to close both gaps, we define a language to construct functional descriptions of the components, allowing the users to specify their needs. From this language, we implement the mappings among functional descriptions and components as a case base collecting “interesting experiences” in the usage of the library. We have used a knowledge representation system based on description logics to build the description language and to implement the case-based reasoning processes. We have applied this approach to support software reuse in the class library of VisualWorks, a Smalltalk programming environment.