Software Reuse through Resource Registries

Software engineering has always had software reuse as one of its key tenets. In both service-oriented and resource-oriented architectures visibility is a prerequisite for fulfilling their respective promises, namely easier reuse of services and resources. Resource registries are a way to achieve such visibility. We argue that resource registries must separate technical, semantic and organizational aspects and leverage popular existing standards. This way they are able to adapt to domain specific requirements and a multitude of categorizations of and associations between resources. These arguments are backed up by examples primarily from the nascent pan-European eGovernment resource network.