Towards a Marketplace of Open Source Software Data

Development, distribution and use of open source software comprise a market of data (source code, bug reports, documentation, number of downloads, etc.) from projects, developers and users. This large amount of data hampers people to make sense of implicit links between software projects, e.g., Dependencies, patterns, licenses. This context raises the question of what techniques and mechanisms can be used to help users and developers to link related pieces of information across software projects. In this paper, we propose a framework for a marketplace enhanced using linked open data (LOD) technology for linking software artifacts within projects as well as across software projects. The marketplace provides the infrastructure for collecting and aggregating software engineering data as well as developing services for mining, statistics, analytics and visualization of software data. Based on cross linking software artifacts and projects, the marketplace enables developers and users to understand the individual value of components and their relationship to bigger software systems. Improved understanding creates new business opportunities for software companies: users will be able to analyze and compare projects, developers can increase the visibility of their products, and hosts may offer plugins and services over the data to paying customers.