RESTful Software Development and Maintenance

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Software systems and information about them (metadata) diverge quickly in time, resulting in difficulties understanding and maintaining them. Various proposals have been made to link software components and their metadata. The authors have proposed another such system using Semantic Web techniques to encode system metadata using an OWL-DL ontology of software engineering concepts, RDF encoding of system metadata and SPARQL queries over the resulting RDF graph to enable language-neutral relational navigation of software systems. Additionally, software components (e.g. classes or procedures) may be packaged with their metadata in XML-encoded "hypercode" documents and served in their various aspects via a representational state transfer (REST) architecture, thus enabling long-term software maintenance of distributed systems. To date, this system supports Java, Python, BeanShell, DPML, Groovy and Javascript. Ruby (via JRuby) is to supported shortly. This system is implemented on the NetKernel microkernel and released under the Open Software License (OSL) verson 3.0.

Stream: Python

Paper: RESTful Software Development and Maintenance

David Hyland-Wood is a Principal of Software Memetics, LLC, a software engineering firm specializing in disruptive technologies, and entrepreneur-in-residence at the MIND Laboratory, University of Maryland College Park. He has founded two companies; Plugged In Software Pty Ltd, a successful software development services company in Australia from 1995-2003 and Tucana Technologies, Inc, a venture-backed product company sold to Northrup Grumman Corporation in 2005. A Semantic Web expert, David is an active member of the World Wide Web Consortium's Semantic Web Coordination Group. He lead the development of the popular Open Source Software project the Kowari Metastore (http://kowari.org) and contributes to the Mulgara Semantic Store (http://mulgara.org). David holds degrees in engineering from the Virginia Military Institute and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and is a Ph.D. candidate at The University of Queensland.