Attribute ranking: An entropy-based approach to accelerating browsing-based component retrieval

A reuse repository is an essential element in component-based software development (CBSD). Querying-based retrieval and browsing-based retrieval are two main retrieval mechanisms provided in real world reuse repositories, especially web-based repositories. Although browsing-based retrieval is superior to querying-based retrieval in some aspects, the tedious retrieval process is its main drawback. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to overcoming this drawback. The basic idea of our approach is to rank the attributes using the information entropy theory. According to our experimental results on real data, our approach can effectively reduce the length of the retrieval sequence. In other words, this approach is helpful in accelerating the process of browsing-based retrieval.