Abstract: As the software reuse practices are deepening and the component repositories are scaling up, representing and retrieving of software components have gained more attention from software engineering researchers Based on the approximate queries of string data, a novel matching model named path containment matching model and the correspondence algorithm is proposed to retrieve reusable components classified in faceted scheme The results show the algorithm has a high search efficiency for the component retrieval The algorithm can be used not only in the component retrieval but also in other fields