Formal specifications, which represent the essential syntactic and semantic information of various possible implementations, provide a basis for software reuse. But, to find a reusable component out of thousands of stored specifications is not an easy task. The specifications, like most programs, consist of brief descriptions and specification texts. To achieve a more accurate retrieval, we use a two‐layer strategy in this paper: First, we attach keywords to each specification where we have abstracted keywords using a new method calledsemanto‐syntactical parsingwhich takes into account both the syntactic and semantic aspects of the narrative descriptions of the specifications. Second, we further consider the signatures of the specifications where we have solved some known problems. Storage, retrieval, and maintenance of the software components are supported by the facilities of an object‐oriented database management systems. The benefits obtained from such a strategy are also described.