EAGER: Boa: A Community Research Infrastructure for Mining Software Repositories

在当今以软件为中心的世界中，超大规模的软件库，如SourceForge(350,000多个项目)、GitHub(250,000多个项目)和Google Code(250,000多个项目)是Alexandria的新库。它们包含一个庞大的软件语料库和有关软件的信息。科学家和工程师都对分析这些丰富的信息感兴趣，既是出于好奇心，也是为了测试重要的研究假设。然而，目前的进入门槛往往是令人望而却步的，只有少数拥有完善的研究基础设施和挖掘软件库的深厚专业知识的人才能尝试这样的超大规模实验。一个名为Boa的设施已经成为原型：一个特定于领域的语言和一个包含70多万个开源项目的BigData储存库，用于分析超大规模的软件储存库，以帮助进行这样的实验。软件工程和编程语言研究人员的广泛社区对这个实验研究基础设施非常感兴趣。这个迫切的项目的主要目标是检查使Boa广泛适用于软件工程和编程语言社区的要求，与最初的一组研究人员合作以尝试满足这些要求，并采取初步步骤使Boa成为社区可维护、可伸缩和可扩展的研究基础设施。这是一个具有能力和变革性的项目。它的成功将有助于和加速软件工程的科学研究，使科学家和工程师能够专注于基本任务。这一进展将主要通过大幅降低准入门槛来实现，从而在这一领域实现更大范围和更雄心勃勃的数据密集型科学发现。

In today's software-centric world, ultra-large-scale software repositories, e.g. SourceForge (350,000+ projects), GitHub (250,000+ projects), and Google Code (250,000+ projects) are the new library of Alexandria. They contain an enormous corpus of software and information about software. Scientists and engineers alike are interested in analyzing this wealth of information both for curiosity as well as for testing important research hypotheses. However, the current barrier to entry is often prohibitive and only a few with well-established research infrastructure and deep expertise in mining software repositories can attempt such ultra-large-scale experiments.A facility called Boa has been prototyped: a domain-specific language and a BIGDATA repository containing 700,000+ open source projects for analyzing ultra-large scale software repositories to help with such experiments.This experimental research infrastructure is of significant interest to a wide community of software engineering and programming language researchers. The main goal of this EAGER project is to examine the requirements for making Boa broadly available to the software engineering and programming language community, to work with an initial set of researchers to try to fulfill these requirements, and to take preliminary steps toward making Boa a community-sustained, scalable, and extensible research infrastructure. This is an enabling and transformative project. Its success will aid and accelerate scientific research in software engineering, allowing scientists and engineers to focus on the essential tasks. This advance will primarily be achieved by significantly lowering the barrier to entry and thus enabling a larger and more ambitious line of data-intensive scientific discovery in this area.