Fostering Synergies - How Semantic Web Technology could influence Software Repositories

The state-of-the-art in mining software repositories stores software artifacts from various sources into monolithic relational databases. This puts a lot of querying power in the hands of the software miners, however it comes at the cost of enclosing the data and hamper cross-application reuse. In this paper we discuss four problem scenarios to illustrate that Semantic Web technology is able to overcome these limitations. However, it requires that the software engineering research community agrees on two prerequisites: (a) a common vocabulary to talk about software repositories – an ontology; (b) a strategy for generating unique and stable references to all software artifacts inside such a repository – a Universal Resource Identifier (URI).