Semantic-Enabled Clone Detection

We introduce semantic-enabled clone detection, as an approach that emphasizes on importance of the token semantics during the pattern matching for clone detection. This approach can be realized using Semantic Web and its support for knowledge modeling. While the Semantic Web has found wide acceptance in various application and research domains, it still lacks the same acceptance in the source code analysis domain. In this paper we focus on how the Semantic Web and its support for semantic modeling and knowledge retrieval can be applied towards source code clone detection and search. We discuss both, open challenges in the source code clone detection domain, as well as both theoretical and practical aspects on how the Semantic Web can address some of these challenges.