Towards a Linked Open Code

Overview & Synopsis

In the last two decades, the Linked Open Data paradigm has been experiencing exponential growth. Regularly, new datasets and ontologies are made publicly available, and novel projects are initiated to stimulate their continuous development and reuse, pushing more and more actors to adhere to the Semantic Web principles. The guidelines provided by the Semantic Web community allow to (i) homogeneously represent, (ii) uniquely identify, and (iii) uniformly reference any piece of information. However, the same standards do not allow defining and referencing the methods to exploit it: functions, procedures, algorithms, and code in general, are left out of this interconnected world. In this paper, we present our vision for a Web with Linked Open Code in which functions could be accessed and used as Linked Data, allowing logic harnessing the latter to be semantically described and FAIRly accessible. Hereafter, we describe the challenges presented by the implementation of our vision. We propose first insights on how to concretize it, and we provide a non-exhaustive list of communities that could benefit from such an ideal.