Software reuse represents an interesting way to achieve quality of the final products, high productivity and cost reduction. In order to reuse components in a software development process, it is necessary to produce a consistent and understandable documentation about them. This is necessary since the developers must understand the component characteristics, functionality and behavior. In this context, this paper proposes a reference model for software components description, representing the necessary information to be defined about a component in order to facilitate its reuse. The paper reports an application using Component-Based Development (CBD) approach where the documentation about the components is defined based on the proposed reference model. The use of the reference model to describe components allows its evaluation and refinement. The main purpose of this reference model is to be a model for the definition of a repository capable to store, catalogue, search and recover components.