Integrating software engineering data using semantic web technologies
A plethora of software engineering data have been produced by different organizations and tools over time. These data may come from different sources, and are often disparate and distributed. The integration of these data may open up the possibility of conducting systemic, holistic study of software projects in ways previously unexplored. Semantic Web technologies have been used successfully in a wide array of domains such as health care and life sciences as a platform for information integration and knowledge management. The success is largely due to the open and extensible nature of ontology languages as well as growing tool support. We believe that Semantic Web technologies represent an ideal platform for the integration of software engineering data in a semantic repository. By querying and analyzing such a repository, researchers and practitioners can better understand and control software engineering activities and processes. In this paper, we describe how we apply Semantic Web techniques to integrate object-oriented software engineering data from different sources. We also show how the integrated data can help us answer complex queries about large-scale software projects through a case study on the Eclipse system.