Open Science: the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies becomes an official sponsor of Software Heritage. A strategic step towards innovation and the preservation of global digital heritage

Starting in November 2024, the Sant’Anna School will become a member and official sponsor of the Software Heritage project, a non-profit initiative coordinated by the French Foundation INRIA Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique in partnership with UNESCO and several international institutions and companies, aimed at creating an open and universal source code archive.

Software Heritage represents the world’s largest repository of source code (and more), containing around 1.5 Petabyte of data, about 20 billion files from over 300 million projects created by more than 70 million authors.

The repository collects and provides access to source code from a large range of software projects, accompanied by full development history and metadata. The purpose is to preserve this digital asset for future generations, enabling researchers, scholars and other stakeholders to explore its evolution and impact on society, ensuring scientific reproducibility, traceability and long-term archiving, and offering opportunities for the development of new Data Science and Artificial Intellgence applications.

Membership motivations

The membership in Software Heritage is funded by the L’EMbeDS Department of Excellence and coordinated by Prof. Paolo Ferragina. It exemplifies the commitment of L’EMbeDS to the integration of different disciplinary perspectives across Economics, Management and Law through the use of Data Science and of its computational and statistical tools. The mission of the Department of Excellence is to bridge the gap between complex models, empirical validation and applications, in both academic research and policymaking aimed at tackling large contemporary challenges. In this perspective, the digital assets provided by Software Heritage represent an enormous value added for the L’EMbeDS community and its activities.

Specific contributions

L’EMbeDS will exploit the opportunities offered by Software Heritage in a wide range of research projects, training tools and innovative applications. Initial research directions will focus on:

• developing a data-intensive platform for storage and research across the entire Software Heritage repository;
• developing Large Language Models (LLM) for code generation and embedding for software-centered Data Science applications. These tools will help analyze traceability, reliability, and security of Software Heritage source code libraries, and will aid the development of new techniques and methodologies for software auditing based on the (millions of) packages available in the archive;
• studying the economic and innovation impact of software libraries usage through distributed platforms such as GitHub or GitLab, which are stored in Software Heritage.

Seminars and workshops will be organized to increase awareness of the importance of Software Heritage across the academic community, promote its use in research and training, and create incentives for all scientific constituencies of L’EMbeDS to contribute to the repository.

On the occasion of the Sant’Anna School's inclusion among the official sponsors of the project, the Rector, Prof. Nuti, stated: “The Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies supports the Software Heritage initiative because its universal, open and sustainable archive is a valuable tool for pursuing and sustaining Open Science. Software Heritage can be an invaluable source of inspiration and opportunities for the Data Science research and education pursued in our Department of Excellence L'EMbeDS, with applications across the Social Sciences, including the fields of Economics, Management and Law, as well as in support to policy making”.

Additional information on Software Heritage is available at the official site