Shortening retrieval sequences in browsing-based component retrieval using information entropy

Reuse repositories are 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, because the browsing-based component retrieval usually involves long retrieval sequences. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to shorten the retrieval sequences in browsing-based component retrieval using information entropy. The basic idea of our approach is to build a navigation model by ranking the features into a tree structure using the components’ indexing information. According to our experimental results on real data, our approach can effectively shorten the average length of retrieval sequences.