Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 September 2009
In this paper, we present an approach to solve the drawbacks of manual composition of software components. Our approach is applied within the jcolibri framework for building case-based reasoning (CBR) applications. We propose a system design process based on reusing templates obtained from previously designed CBR systems. Templates store the control flow of the CBR applications and include semantic annotations conceptualizing its behavior and expertise. We use CBR ontology to formalize syntactical, semantical and pragmatical aspects of the reusable components of the framework. The ontology vocabulary facilitates an annotation process of the components and allows to reason about their composition, facilitating the semi-automatic configuration of complex systems from their composing pieces.