Goblin: A Framework for Enriching and Querying the Maven Central Dependency Graph

Dependency graphs support software maintenance and software ecosystem analysis. Several metrics can be used on top of these graph models but the set of such metrics is to evolve over time. Further, some metrics have a dynamic nature, requiring being able to "rewind" dependency graphs at some point in time. To address these issues we propose the Goblin framework. It is composed of a dependency graph metamodel with time-related information, a miner to retrieve the graph from Maven Central, and a tool for on-demand metric weaving into dependency graphs. As a whole, Goblin is a customizable framework for ecosystem and dependency analysis. This is illustrated with a set of complementary experiments. Our tools, datasets, and experiments are freely available online.