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XRealiSE

December 16th, 2021

Search for Unity mixed reality components on GitHub.

Manager(s) Ralf Klamma
Benedikt Hensen
Funding RWTH Aachen University
Status Running
Research Field Advanced Community Information Systems (ACIS)
Website https://xrealise.dbis.rwth-aachen.de/

Since it is complicated and time consuming to search for other mixed reality projects with the intention to reuse modules of them, the goal is to provide a specialized search engine that focuses on Unity based mixed reality projects on GitHub to help developers to find components in other projects that provide the needed functionality. This could save a large amount of work and time and may provide well maintained solutions from other projects. Additionally, it can help to find inspirations and different approaches to solve a specific problem. To realize this search engine, we collect all relevant repositories from GitHub. This is done by a crawler that searches for Unity-structured projects. The crawler then extracts information from each relevant repository. Relevant information are either keywords to search in or metadata to filter by. This process also contains the identification of sources for specific information about the functionality and compatibility of the project. The crawler then feeds this structured data about each project into a database. With this database of Unity projects, we can implement a search engine, accessible as a Web page, to provide a user interface for searching in the crawled repositories database. After a search is processed the found repositories are presented on the Web page. When presenting these results, the ranking also needs to be considered because there are known quality metrics for GitHub projects like project popularity and the speed of solved issues, but in the field of mixed reality even the small and less popular projects are still of good quality, so they have to be considered and their lack of popularity or issue solving must not be a negative factor. Therefore, work is needed in terms of how to rate the quality of the project and relevance that works equally for small and big projects.