Data-Driven Analytics Towards Software Sustainability: The Case Of Open-Source Multimedia Tools On Cultural Storytelling

The continuous evolution of modern software technologies combined with the deluge of available "ready-to-use" data has triggered revolutionary breakthroughs in several domains, preservation of cultural heritage included. This breakthrough is more than obvious just by considering the numerous multimedia tools and frameworks that actually serve as a means of providing enhanced cultural storytelling experiences (e.g., navigation in historical sites using VR, 3D modeling of artifacts, or even holograms), which are now readily available. In this context and inspired by the vital importance of sustainability as a concept that expresses the need to create the necessary conditions for future generations to use and evolve present artifacts, we target the software engineering domain and propose a systematic way towards measuring the extent to which a software artifact developed and applied in the cultural heritage domain is sustainable. To that end, we present a data-driven methodology that harnesses data residing in online software repositories and involves the analysis of various open-source multimedia tools and frameworks.