SEON: a pyramid of ontologies for software evolution and its applications

Abstract

The Semantic Web provides a standardized, well-established framework to define and work with ontologies. It is especially apt for machine processing. However, researchers in the field of software evolution have not really taken advantage of that so far.In this paper, we address the potential of representing software evolution knowledge with ontologies and Semantic Web technology, such as Linked Data and automated reasoning.We present SEON, a pyramid of ontologies for software evolution, which describes stakeholders, their activities, artifacts they create, and the relations among all of them. We show the use of evolution-specific ontologies for establishing a shared taxonomy of software analysis services, for defining extensible meta-models, for explicitly describing relationships among artifacts, and for linking data such as code structures, issues (change requests), bugs, and basically any changes made to a system over time.For validation, we discuss three different approaches, which are backed by SEON and enable semantically enriched software evolution analysis. These techniques have been fully implemented as tools and cover software analysis with web services, a natural language query interface for developers, and large-scale software visualization. Abstract The Semantic Web provides a standardized, well-established framework to define and work with ontologies. It is especially apt for machine processing. However, researchers in the field of software evolution have not really taken advantage of that so far. In this paper, we address the potential of representing software evolution knowledge with ontologies and Semantic Web technology, such as Linked Data and automated reasoning. We present Seon, a pyramid of ontologies for software evolution, which describes stakeholders, their activities, artifacts they create, and the relations among all of them. We show the use of evolution-specific ontologies for establishing a shared taxonomy of software analysis services, for defining extensible meta-models, for explicitly describing relationships among artifacts, and for linking data such as code structures, issues (change requests), bugs, and basically any changes made to a system over time. For validation, we discuss three different approaches, which are backed by Seon and enable semantically enriched software evolution analysis. These techniques have been fully implemented as tools and cover software analysis with web services, a natural language query interface for developers, and large-scale software visualization.

Replicating mining studies with SOFAS

“…Java-specific constructs, SVN concepts, etc.). We refer to [36] and SEON 's official web page for more details on the approach and for a description of some of these ontologies.…”

A comprehensive and scalable method for analyzing fine-grained source code change patterns

“…For this, we used virtual machines to built the kernel in the original old environments and created call graphs in full length. 15 To represent facts of call relations, we introduced a new predicate ncc:mayCall whose domain and range are both c:FunctionDefinition. Since call graphs generated by ncc refer to a function by its name, line range, and file location, we had to match the function name, the line range, and the file location with those of a c:FunctionDefinition entity identified by Diff/TS for integrating facts.…”

“…We chose drivers and sound sub-directories for this. At the same time, we use 15 Although releases from 2.6.12 through 2.6.39 are available from the repository, we dropped the earliest 6 releases due to the lack of time for preparing very old environments. the git-blame command to identify commits of insertion by specifying line ranges of inserted function calls.…”

“…There exist researches that define software ontologies for the purpose of data exchange among tools [13], [14], [15]. Our method focuses on ontologies for source code changes at the low level of ASTs, which can be incorporated into high level ontologies proposed before.…”

Evaluating a query framework for software evolution data

“…It represents our attempt to formally describe knowledge from the domain of software evolution analysis and mining software repositories [Würsch et al 2012]. SEON covers a multitude of concepts but for the work presented in this paper only those related to source code, development history, issues and bugs, as well as fine-grained changes are of relevance.…”