The set of characteristics associated with a given component forms its software descriptor . A descriptor base is presented where descriptors are organized on the basis of structured relationships, such as similarity and composition. The classification is supported by a thesaurus acting as a language-independent unified lexicon. The descriptor base is conceived for developers who, besides conventionally browsing the descriptors hierarchy, can query the system, specifying a set of desired functionalities and getting a ranked set of adaptable candidates. User feedback is taken into account in order to progressively ameliorate the quality of the descriptors according to the views of the user community.
Feedback is made dependent of the user typology through a user profile .
Experimental results in terms of recall and precision of the retrieval mechanism against a sample code base are reported.