A methodology for reusing any kind of knowledge at low costuniversal knowledge reuse

Résumé

Classical Software Reuse is not fancy anymore. Systematic Software Reuse nowadays is not interesting, profitable and easy for practitioners, and a new viewpoint of reuse is needed. This research enlightens a new perspective of reuse going back to the origins, stating for improving retrieval techniques, dropping the investments costs needed in systematic reuse, including traceability in the process, and reducing the chaos of ad-hoc reuse. This new perspective, called Universal Knowledge Reuse (UKR) incorporates a methodology including a set of tasks that copes with the problems of index, retrieval and traceability; and all the problems showed by systematic and ad-hoc reuse. UKR deals also with the fact that reuse in our time (information age) must be independent of the kind of knowledge to reuse, the context where it must be reused, or even the user that demands the need. Software Reuse evolves towards Knowledge Reuse; which introduces a transition to the Universal Knowledge Reuse. An experimentation is also included in order to validate the feasibility of this research and its application.