Software semantic provisioning actually reusing software

Delivering component-oriented architectures is a well-established trend in software engineering and development. Assessing software reuse scenarios goes much beyond the usual "build vs buy" dilemma that so often occurs in early stages of a software process: scouting, comparing, choosing and integrating the right set of components meeting project's requirements is still an ad-hoc and error-prone task, performed by developers with little or no frameworks and tools to support them. This paper describes the SSP (Software Semantic Provisioning) project, funded in its early stages by Google™ Inc., developed during the Google Summer of Code™ 2007 program, and incubated by the Eclipse Software Foundation; the project aims to provide an ontological description of the software domain to underlie a semantic web framework to support developers in scouting and provisioning software components. A prototypical RESTful semantic repository, and an Eclipse plug-in consuming the repository services have been implemented and will be discussed.