CodeOntology: RDF-ization of source code

ATZENI, MATTIA;Atzori, Maurizio

2017-01-01

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Abstract

In this paper, we leverage advances in the Semantic Web area, including data modeling (RDF), data management and querying (JENA and SPARQL), to develop CodeOntology, a community-shared software framework supporting expressive queries over source code. The project consists of two main contributions: an ontology that provides a formal representation of object-oriented programming languages, and a parser that is able to analyze Java source code and serialize it into RDF triples. The parser has been successfully applied to the source code of OpenJDK 8, gathering a structured dataset consisting of more than 2 million RDF triples. CodeOntology allows to generate Linked Data from any Java project, thereby enabling the execution of highly expressive queries over source code, by means of a powerful language like SPARQL.