An Exploratory Research of GitHub Based on Graph Model

GitHub has accumulated a great number of developers and open source projects. In this research, we utilize property graph model to explore complex relationships and entities of GitHub. We attempt to answer three questions associated with GitHub using the dataset from MSR2014 data challenge. Firstly, we propose a graph based method to find out the cross technology background developers on GitHub. Secondly we define interesting metrics based on discrete entropy to analyze the project imbalance induced by commit action within a software family. The results show that the imbalance of development size induced by root projects is greater than that of development speed. Finally, we sort out the relatively important root projects with two link analysis methods and the experiment result demonstrates that our method is effective.