J-META: a language to describe software in Eclipse community

Information retrieval is one of the main activities in different domains such as e-commerce, e-learning or document management. Searching in large amount of data faces two main problems: the suitability of the results with respect to the user’s request, and the quantity of the results obtained. One of the most popular solutions for this problem is to define more and more effective description languages. In order to allow the search engine to find the resource that best fit the user’s needs, that can be very specific, detailed description are needed. Finding the right level of the description is the current challenge, of the researches in e-learning, e-commerce and document management domains. For instance, a teacher can search a Learning Object (LO) about a simulation of a chemical reaction, in order to enrich his/her courseware. Thus, the LO description should not contain only information about title, authors, time of fruition, and so on, but should contain more specific information such as the type of content, learning prerequisites and objectives, teaching strategy implemented, students addressed, and so forth. In an open source scenario, the problem is the same. In fact a developer needs to find a software component, which must be integrated in existing system architecture. In order to find the right component, technical issues should be described. It will be interesting if the open source web site supply an intelligent search engine which is able to select the software according with the developer’s requirements. It will possible only if detailed descriptions of each resource are supplied. The paper proposes a description language, named J-META, to describe software resources (plugin) in the Eclipse open community.