Reproducible software experiments through semantic configurations

Dear all,

Some of you may recognise the following problem:

Let’s say you just read an article that is based on a software-driven experiment,
and want to reproduce the results.
While the article mentions what software it uses,
it doesn’t mention the versions of that software and its dependencies,
or the configuration that was used to run the experiment.
Yet, these are essential details for reproducing experimental results,
as a slightly different configuration might lead to significantly different reslts.

That is why we (Joachim Van Herwegen, Sarven Capadisli, Ruben Verborgh and myself),
decided to eat our own dogfood by describing and publishing these software configurations as Linked Data.

In reply to the ISWC 2017 call for in-use papers,
we wrote an article titled:
  
 Reproducible software experiments through semantic configurations

In this work, we introduce ontologies to describe software components
and their configurations to facilitate reproducible software experiments.
For semantic interlinking between these components and their configurations,
we publish the the metadata of all 480,000+ JavaScript libraries on npm as 174,000,000+ RDF triples [1].
Furthermore, we introduce a dependency injection framework [2] that understands these configurations
and is able to instantiate software based on this.

This article is self-published on:
https://linkedsoftwaredependencies.org/articles/reproducibility/

Public reviews, feedback or other comments on the article itself are welcome.
This can be done by signing in and commenting with your WebID, which is powered by dokieli [3].

[1] https://fragments.linkedsoftwaredependencies.org/npm
[2] https://github.com/LinkedSoftwareDependencies/Components.js
[3] https://dokie.li/

Kind regards,
Ruben Taelman