Towards a Methodology for Knowledge Reuse Based on Semantic Repositories

Although reuse is generally considered a good practice within software engineering, several problems dissuade its industrial application and a new viewpoint is needed. This paper presents a new perspective of reuse based on improved retrieval techniques for semantic content (knowledge). This approach, called Universal Knowledge Reuse Methodology (UKRM), drops the investment costs needed in systematic reuse, including the cost of traceability in the process, and reduces the chaos of ad-hoc reuse. UKRM makes reuse independent of the type of content, the context where it will be reused, and even the user that demands it. The paper includes an incremental experiment in order to validate the feasibility of this proposal.