Graph Search of Software Models Using Multidimensional Scaling
Bojana Bislimovska, Güneş Aluç, M. TAMER ÖZSU, Piero Fraternali · EDBT/ICDT Workshops · 2015
Software models formalize the requirements, structure and behavior of a system or application. They represent essential artifacts that simplify the process of software development. Software repositories have been developed to store models in order to facilitate the reuse of know-how from software projects; however, methods for searching these model repositories are not very efficient. Specifically, while being more scalable, general-purpose keyword search is not suitable for model search because it does not consider the structure that is inherent in software models: a good search algorithm should consider the model structure as well as the knowledge concentrated in the metamodel. On the other hand, existing approaches that consider the structure while querying software models are limited to only specific domains such as Business Process Models (BPMs). In this paper, we introduce MultiModGraph, an efficient approach for indexing and searching model repositories. MultiModGraph preserves the model structure and metamodel information by representing models as graphs. To enable efficient search, the approach employs multidimensional scaling to approximately map vertices of the model graph to points in space. We evaluate MultiModGraph both with respect to speed and quality of results using a real-word repository of web application models.