Searching for Class Models.

Models in model-based development play a major role and serve as the main design artifacts, in particular class models. As there are difficulties in developing high-quality models, different repositories of models are established to address that challenge, so developers would have a reference model. Following the existence of such repositories, there is a need for tools that can retrieve similar high-quality models. To search for models in these repositories, we propose a greedy algorithm that matches the developer’s intention by considering semantic similarity, structure similarity, and type similarity. The initial evaluation indicates that the algorithm achieved high performance in finding the relevant class model fragments. Though additional examination is required, the sought algorithm can be easily adapted to other modeling languages for searching models and their encapsulated knowledge.