A Semantic Web Enabled Approach for Dependency Management

The use of external libraries in today's software projects allows developers to take advantage of features provided by such application programming interfaces (APIs) without having to reinvent the wheel. However, APIs have also introduced new challenges to the software engineering community (e.g. API incompatibilities, software vulnerabilities, and license violations) that extend beyond traditional project boundaries and often involve different software artifacts. One potential solution to these challenges is to provide a technology-independent representation of software dependency semantics and its integration with knowledge from other software artifacts. In our research, we take advantage of the semantic web (SW) and its technology stack to establish a unified knowledge representation of build and dependency repositories. Given this knowledge base, we can now extend and integrate other (heterogeneous) resources to allow for a flexible and comprehensive global impact analysis approach. To illustrate the applicability of our SW-enabled modeling approach, we discuss two different applications. These applications illustrate how our modeling approach can not only integrate and reuse knowledge from dependency management systems and other software artifacts, but also take advantage of inference services provided by the SW to support novel software analytics services across artifact and project boundaries.