DockerPedia: A Knowledge Graph of Software Images and Their Metadata

Abstract

An increasing amount of researchers use software images to capture the requirements and code dependencies needed to carry out computational experiments. Software images preserve the computational environment required to execute a scientific experiment and have become a crucial asset for reproducibility. However, software images are usually not properly documented and described, making it challenging for scientists to find, reuse and understand them. In this paper, we propose a framework for automatically describing software images in a machine-readable manner by (i) creating a vocabulary to describe software images; (ii) developing an annotation framework designed to automatically document the underlying environment of software images and (iii) creating DockerPedia, a Knowledge Graph with over 150,000 annotated software images, automatically described using our framework. We illustrate the usefulness of our approach in finding images with specific software dependencies, comparing similar software images, addressing versioning problems when running computational experiments; and flagging problems with vulnerable software dependencies.