# The Maven Dependency Graph: a Temporal Graph-based Representation of Maven Central

## TL;DR

This paper introduces the Maven Dependency Graph, a comprehensive, queryable graph database snapshot of Maven Central as of September 6, 2018, enabling detailed analysis of Java artifact dependencies and ecosystem evolution.

## Contribution

It provides an explicit dependency graph of Maven artifacts and an infrastructure for querying this large dataset, addressing scalability and modeling challenges.

## Key findings

- Complete dependency graph of Maven Central as of 2018-09-06
- Open source infrastructure for querying Maven dependency data
- Facilitates analysis of Java ecosystem architecture and evolution

## Abstract

The Maven Central Repository provides an extraordinary source of data to understand complex architecture and evolution phenomena among Java applications. As of September 6, 2018, this repository includes 2.8M artifacts (compiled piece of code implemented in a JVM-based language), each of which is characterized with metadata such as exact version, date of upload and list of dependencies towards other artifacts. Today, one who wants to analyze the complete ecosystem of Maven artifacts and their dependencies faces two key challenges: (i) this is a huge data set; and (ii) dependency relationships among artifacts are not modeled explicitly and cannot be queried. In this paper, we present the Maven Dependency Graph. This open source data set provides two contributions: a snapshot of the whole Maven Central taken on September 6, 2018, stored in a graph database in which we explicitly model all dependencies; an open source infrastructure to query this huge dataset.