Nowadays, Component-Based Development (CBD) has been widely used in software engineering. As a core activity in the CBD process, component retrieval has attracted extensive research attention. Despite the research efforts so far, one major problem still exists in component retrieval, that is, the mismatch between user’s query and identified components. This paper proposes a semantics-base approach to tackle the mismatch issue in component retrieval process effectively. A review is first presented on the current state of relevant technologies involved in semantics-based component retrieval, and on the current development in this field. Component retrieval rating factors and their calculating method are proposed. The rating factors are used to illustrate and improve the precision of component retrieval in quantitatively.