Automatic link extraction: The good, the bad and the ugly in software ecosystem mining

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges and pitfalls of automatic link extraction in software ecosystem mining, based on manual investigation of RubyGems data, and proposes automation to improve dataset completeness.

Contribution

It identifies common pitfalls in automatic link extraction from software repositories and suggests automation techniques to enhance data quality for ecosystem analysis.

Findings

Manual investigation revealed key pitfalls in link extraction.

Automation can mitigate these pitfalls and improve dataset completeness.

Enhanced datasets support better multi-platform software ecosystem studies.

Abstract

This abstract presents the automatic link extraction pitfalls based on our experience on manually investigating links in the RubyGems package manager metadata. This work can lead in automating the link extraction approach so as to avoid these pitfalls and produce more complete datasets to be used by researchers when they investigate the multi-platform evolution of software ecosystems.