Towards a Linked Data Vocabulary for the Certification of Software Properties

In order to cater for a growing user base that requires varied functionalities and owns multiple devices, software providers are using cloud solutions as the preferred technical means. In fact, all major operating systems come with a tight integration to cloud services. Software solutions that have such integration with cloud services should disclose (transparency) this to the consumer. Furthermore, with mounting concerns over the security of software, consumers are demanding assurance over the software being used. Software certification can address both issues: security and transparency of software, thereby providing comprehensive assurance to consumers. However current software certifications are tailored for human consumption and represented in natural language, a major issue that hinders automated reasoning to be performed on them. Focused research efforts in the past few years have resulted in a Digital Certification concept, a machine process able representation of certifications, that can cater to different software provisioning models. We extend the notion of a Digital Certification by using the Linked Data vocabulary to express general characteristics of software systems that benefits from existing and future knowledge from the Linked Data community. This greatly increases the usability of such Digital Certifications and has a wider impact on the Software certification landscape.