Project repositories are a central asset in software development, as they preserve the technical knowledge gathered in past development activities. However, locating relevant information in a vast project repository is problematic, because it requires manually tagging projects with accurate metadata, an activity which is time consuming and prone to errors and omissions. This paper investigates the use of classical Information Retrieval techniques for easing the discovery of useful information from past projects. Differently from approaches based on textual search over the source code of applications or on querying structured metadata, we propose to index and search the models of applications, which are available in companies applying Model-Driven Engineering practices. We contrast alternative index structures and result presentations, and evaluate a prototype implementation on real-world experimental data.

9. Overall Architecture of the System Engineering Web Search Application Bozzon, Brambilla, Tutorial @ICWE2010

15. Example of Model Indexing Metamodel Model Model XML Representation Product Catalogue Catalogue Home Page List Products List of product in the catalogue View Details Details of a selected product HYPERTEXT MODEL 1 ID Product Catalogue Application PROJECT NAME Multi-Field

16. Example of Model Indexing Metamodel Model Model XML Representation Product|2.0 Catalogue|2.0 Catalogue|1.0 Home|1.0 Page|1.0 List|0.5 Products|0.5 List|0.2 of|0.2 products|0.2 in|0.2 the|0.2 catalogue|0.2 View Details Details of a selected product HYPERTEXT MODEL 1 ID Product Catalogue Application PROJECT NAME Multi-Field, Weighted Index 2.0 1.0 0.5

19. Detailed indexing process

29. Thanks! Questions? Alessandro Bozzon Marco Brambilla Piero Fraternali [email_address] ? Searching Repositories of Web Application Models