Semantic Web - The Missing Link in Global Source Code Analysis?

There has been an ongoing trend towards open and shared source code that is published on the Internet in large software repositories to support collaborative development processes. While traditional source code analysis techniques perform well in single project contexts, new types of global source code analysis techniques are slowly introduced to address the analysis of global distributed and often incomplete source code. In this article, we discuss how the Semantic Web, an enabling technology for these emerging source code analysis domains, can support a standardized, formal, and semantic rich representation to model these corpora. We also illustrate how inference services can be used to provide support for emerging source code analysis approaches on this data, such as search, call graph construction, and clone detection.