InQuisiX—an electronic catalog for software reuse

InQuisiX is an interactive system supporting the development and use of an electronic catalog. Features are provided for organizing the catalog, classifying and describing items, and searching and browsing catalog descriptions. Items described in the catalog are stored elsewhere and are accessed for display or retrieval through end-user tools integrated with InQuisiX. InQuisiX provides public interfaces for loading data, exchanging catalog data with other tools, invoking end-user tools, and making searchable any information stored outside the catalog, such as documents or graphics.Although InQuisiX is being marketed for use in cataloguing reusable software assets, there is nothing inherent in the design or functionality which restricts its use to this domain. Certain features, particularly the ability to invoke and work cooperatively with other automated tools in the development environment, are particularly useful to software developers. Hexible classification and description features are also important for the emerging software reuse market because best practices in classifying and describing software are still a research topic.InQuisiX runs on UNIX/X Window based environments and is currently hosted on both Sun SPARCstations and IBM RISC 6000 workstations. The system has been developed entirely in Classic-Ada, an object-oriented preprocessor for Ada, and uses a custom, automatically generated persistent object base for storing all information, including both the organization and the contents of the catalog, inverted indexes used to support searching, saved queries, and interfaces to end-user tools. The object base is implemented as a single binary file.