MUDABlue: An automatic categorization system for Open Source repositories

Open Source communities typically use a software repository to archive various software projects with their source code, mailing list discussions, documentation, bug reports, and so forth. For example, SourceForge currently hosts over seventy thousand Open Source software systems. Because of the size of the rich information content, such repositories offer numerous opportunities for sharing information among projects. For example, one would like to know a set of projects that are related or similar to each other, so that the project groups can collaborate and share their work. With thousands of projects in typical repositories, however, manually locating related projects can be difficult. Hence, we propose MUDABlue, a tool that automatically categorizes software systems. MUDABlue has three major aspects: (1) it relies on no other information than the source code, (2) it determines category sets automatically, and (3) it allows a software system to be a member of multiple categories. MUDABlue has a Web interface to visualize determined categories, which eases browsing a software repository. We show the effectiveness of MUDABlue's categorization capability by comparing its generated categories with that of some other existing research tools.