Describing configurations of software experiments as Linked Data

Within computer science engineering, research articles often rely on software experiments in order to evaluate contributions. Reproducing such experiments involves setting up software, benchmarks, and test data. Unfortunately, many articles ambiguously refer to software by name only, leaving out crucial details for reproducibility, such as module and dependency version numbers or the configuration of individual components in different setups. To address this, we created the Object-Oriented Components ontology for the semantic description of software components and their configuration. This article discusses the ontology and its application, and demonstrates with a use case how to publish experiments and their software configurations on the Web. In order to enable semantic interlinking between configurations and modules, we published the metadata of all 500,000+ JavaScript libraries on npm as 200,000,000+ RDF triples. Through our work, research articles can refer by URL to fine-grained descriptions of experimental setups. This brings us faster to accurate reproductions of experiments, and facilitates the evaluation of new research contributions with different software configurations. In the future, software could be instantiated automatically based on these descriptions and configurations, reasoning and querying can be applied to software configurations for meta-research purposes.

@inproceedings{vanherwegen_semsci_2017,
  title = {Describing configurations of software experiments as {Linked} {Data}},
  author = {Van Herwegen, Joachim and Taelman, Ruben and Capadisli, Sarven and Verborgh, Ruben},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the First Workshop on Enabling Open Semantic Science (SemSci)},
  year = {2017},
  month = oct,
  url = {https://linkedsoftwaredependencies.org/articles/describing-experiments/}
}