A semantic model to publish open source software on the web of data

Purpose The purpose of the paper is to propose a semantic model for describing open source software (OSS) in a machine-human understandable format. The model is extracted to support source code reusing and revising as the two primary targets of OSS through a systematic review of related documents. Design/methodology/approach Conducting a systematic review, all the software reusing criteria are identified and introduced to the web of data by an ontology for OSS (O4OSS). The software semantic model introduced in this paper explores OSS through triple expressions in which the O4OSS properties are predicates. Findings This model improves the quality of web data by describing software in a structured machine-human readable profile, which is linked to the related data that was previously published on the web. Evaluating the OSS semantic model is accomplished through comparing it with previous approaches, comparing the software structured metadata with profile index of software in some well-known repositories, calculating the software retrieval rank and surveying domain experts. Originality/value Considering context-specific information and authority levels, the proposed software model would be applicable to any open and close software. Using this model to publish software provides an infrastructure of connected meaningful data and helps developers overcome some specific challenges. By navigating software data, many questions which can be answered only through reading multiple documents can be automatically responded on the web of data.