With the advent of Component-based software engineering (CBSE), large software systems are being built by integrating pre-built software components. The Semantic Web in association with CBSE has shown to offer powerful representation facilities and reasoning techniques to enhance and support querying, reasoning, discovery, etc. of software components. The goal of this paper is to research the applicability of Semantic Web technologies in performing the various tasks of CBSE and review the experimental results of the same in an easy and effective manner. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study which provides an extensive review of the application of Semantic Web in CBSE from different perspectives. A systematic literature review of the Semantic Web approaches, employed for use in CBSE, reported from 2001 until 2015, is conducted in this research article. Empirical results have been drawn through the question-answer based analysis of the research, which clearly tells the year wise trend of the research articles, with the possible justification of the usage of Semantic Web technology and tools for a particular phase of CBSE. To conclude, gaps in the current research and potential future prospects have been discussed. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.