Software component and the semantic Web: An in-depth content analysis and integration history

Highlights

• • A detailed study on the use of Semantic Web technologies in CBSE.

• • Advancement is being made from using ontological concepts to Linked Data in CBSE.

• • Semantic web techniques help in addressing the various challenges that CBSE faces.

• • Simple and freely accessible CBSE applications that employ Semantic Web are limited.

• • Some open issues relevant to the topic in concern have been examined.

Abstract

With the advent of Component-based software engineering (CBSE), large software systems are being built by integrating pre-built software components. The Semantic Web in association with CBSE has shown to offer powerful representation facilities and reasoning techniques to enhance and support querying, reasoning, discovery, etc. of software components. The goal of this paper is to research the applicability of Semantic Web technologies in performing the various tasks of CBSE and review the experimental results of the same in an easy and effective manner. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study which provides an extensive review of the application of Semantic Web in CBSE from different perspectives. A systematic literature review of the Semantic Web approaches, employed for use in CBSE, reported from 2001 until 2015, is conducted in this research article. Empirical results have been drawn through the question-answer based analysis of the research, which clearly tells the year wise trend of the research articles, with the possible justification of the usage of Semantic Web technology and tools for a particular phase of CBSE. To conclude, gaps in the current research and potential future prospects have been discussed.

Introduction

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) (Cai et al., 2000) has been a transition from the conventional development process to promote software development in an economical, effective and faster manner through the reuse and integration of software packages named as component or COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf). Ample amount of research has been done on the various aspects, phases, and characteristics of the CBSE process since its provenance in the industry. This is because of the numerous advantages (Debayan, 2011) that it has over the traditional methods of software development like reusability, replaceability, extensibility, context independence, minimal inter-component dependency, etc. all of which lead to the increased productivity and decreased cost of development.

Even though component development has vast benefits, component-based systems have been generally afflicted with different issues concerning system integration and composition, due to which it has not been able to achieve its full potential:

• Firstly, there is no clear protocol to specify a third-party component's description, configuration, integration, and modification, so that it can be accommodated within distributed development environments or within third-party system requirements (Crnkovic, 2001).

• Secondly, due to the absence of proper query methods and techniques, off-the-shelf component integration also involves the problem of locating and retrieving reusable components which fulfil the user's requirements (Vitharana, 2003).

• Lastly, there have been methods discussed in the literature that automatically build composite components. However, when there is an absence of pre-conditions and effects in the developer's requirements, the traditional techniques may generate composite components which contradict to the developer's needs (Rosa and Lucena Jr, 2011).

Thus, component-based development has still not been able to acquire its full capability as a result of these few major hurdles. A suitable solution to this lies in Semantic Web technologies (Cardoso, 2007) which “help machines comprehend additional information located on the Web to make them support automation of tasks and richer data discovery, data navigation and integration” . In other words, Semantic Web contains the ability to methodically express the intended semantics and aids in automated reasoning, supporting, sharing, integration and management of information from heterogeneous sources (Cardoso and Sheth, 2006). These capabilities of Semantic Web perfectly satisfy all those general requirements of exploring, retrieving and describing the source-code component relationships in large object-oriented reuse frameworks or libraries for the efficient working of the component-based development process.

This Systematic Literature Review (SLR) aims to describe the latest state-of-the-art Semantic Web technologies employed to ease and improve the process of CBSE. The systematic review conducted in this research work is performed in accordance with the guidelines proposed by Kitchenham, 2004. To identify the most important studies in accordance with relevance and quality, we have performed the search in four primary digital libraries. We posed certain research questions, stated in Section 3, which supported us to gather the essential information from the research articles in our review process.

The discussion proceeds as follows: the background of Semantic Web technologies is described in Section 2. Section 3 analyses the research method undertaken to perform the review process, stating the research questions formulated. Section 4 researches and reviews the status of Semantic Web in CBSE and explains the papers investigated in this study in a clear and concise tabular format. Section 5 discusses the findings of this paper in terms of results and attempts to answer the research questions stated in Table 1 of Section 3. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper, stating the additions which could be made to the current scenario of research related to the area of concern.