Abstract
Software complexity has increased substantially in the last decade. This has made software development teams work faster and under tight budgets. Reusing software can be a way of solving this problem. Companies should reuse previous working solutions in new projects, decreasing the development time and increasing software quality. But there are at least two requirements to implement this solution. One is that the company must have a central knowledge repository with software specifications, designs and code from previous system developments. The second one is to have at the disposal tools capable of using this repository in an intelligent way. We have developed a system capable of providing these requirements. It has a central knowledge base that can be used through Case‐Based Reasoning. The knowledge base integrates a common ontology called WordNet, providing classification for software objects. This paper focuses on the retrieval of design models using the combination of WordNet and Case‐Based Reasoning. We also present a retrieval example, and experimental work showing the performance of the retrieval and ranking mechanisms.