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Software traceability establishes a network of connections between diverse artifacts such as requirements, design, and code. However, given the cost and effort of creating and maintaining trace links manually, researchers have proposed automated approaches using information retrieval techniques. Current approaches focus almost entirely upon generating links between pairs of artifacts and have not leveraged the broader network of interconnected artifacts. In this paper we investigate the use of intermediate artifacts to enhance the accuracy of the generated trace links - focusing on paths consisting of source, target, and intermediate artifacts. We propose and evaluate combinations of techniques for computing semantic similarity, scaling scores across multiple paths, and aggregating results from multiple paths. We report results from five projects, including one large industrial project. We find that leveraging intermediate artifacts improves the accuracy of end-to-end trace retrieval across all datasets and accuracy metrics. After further analysis, we discover that leveraging intermediate artifacts is only helpful when a project's artifacts share a common vocabulary, which tends to occur in refinement and decomposition hierarchies of artifacts. Given our hybrid approach that integrates both direct and transitive links, we observed little to no loss of accuracy when intermediate artifacts lacked a shared vocabulary with source or target artifacts.
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This content will become publicly available on January 28, 2026
TROV - A Model and Vocabulary for Describing Transparent Research Objects
The Transparent Research Object Vocabulary (TROV) is a key element of the Transparency Certified (TRACE) approach to ensuring research trustworthiness. In contrast with methods that entail repeating computations in part or in full to verify that the descriptions of methods included in a publication are sufficient to reproduce reported results, the TRACE approach depends on a controlled computing environment termed a Transparent Research System (TRS) to guarantee that accurate, sufficiently complete, and otherwise trustworthy records are captured when results are obtained in the first place. Records identifying (1) the digital artifacts and computations that yielded a research result, (2) the TRS that witnessed the artifacts and supervised the computations, and (3) the specific conditions enforced by the TRS that warrant trust in these records, together constitute a Transparent Research Object (TRO). Digital signatures provided by the TRS and by a trusted third-party timestamp authority (TSA) guarantee the integrity and authenticity of the TRO. The controlled vocabulary TROV provides means to declare and query the properties of a TRO, to enumerate the dimensions of trustworthiness the TRS asserts for a TRO, and to verify that each such assertion is warranted by the documented capabilities of the TRS. Our approach for describing, publishing, and working with TROs imposes no restrictions on how computational artifacts are packaged or otherwise shared, and aims to be interoperable with, rather than to replace, current and future Research Object standards, archival formats, and repository layouts.
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- PAR ID:
- 10612046
- Publisher / Repository:
- Edinburgh University
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Digital Curation
- Volume:
- 19
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1746-8256
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 7
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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