Metadata Anchoring for Source Code: Robust Location Descriptor Definition, Building and Interpreting

摘要

Metadata of dynamic data such as source code have to be maintained after modifications. The first step of metadata maintenance is a repair of metadata anchoring after a modification of the content. Many anchoring approaches exist for regular texts or web pages, but they are not directly applicable for source code. We propose metadata anchoring approach for source code. Metadata represented as information tags are connected to particular line of source code or word in program method or source code file. Our proposal contains a definition of the robust location descriptor and the algorithm for building and interpreting the descriptor. We evaluate our approach on the dataset of change sets from commercial projects with more than sixty thousand C# files.