An Approach for Software Component Reusing Based on Ontological Mapping

The ontological formalism is an effective way for enabling interoperability across heterogeneous systems, services and users. In this scenario, a very challenging problem is the learning process of a shared ontology: humans usually represent a same domain by the use of different ontologies, semantically similar, that can differ in their structure, concepts, relations and attributes. An effective solution to this problem is the introduction of methodologies for recognizing semantic similarities among the various views of the domain expressed by the ontologies. This paper shows how an effective ontological mapping approach can improve and support complex processes as software component reusing. First, an approach to the ontology mapping will be described and tested by the use of standards datasets. Its application to the software component reuse will be introduced in the second section of this paper. In particular, a case study and the obtained results will be discussed.