POM2RDF

Transforms Maven POM file into an RDF graph of project dependencies. It can be used to generate a dependency graph or a software bill of materials.

It is implemented as an XSLT 3.0 stylesheet that starts from the initial POM project, traverses down the dependency tree and embeds the metadata of the depending projects recursively.

Usage

Mount the POM file as volume and run the container to get the output in doap.rdf:

docker run --rm -v "$PWD/pom.xml":"/xml/pom.xml" atomgraph/pom2rdf -s:/xml/pom.xml > doap.rdf

Note that we use $PWD in order to make host filepath absolute, as required by Docker's -v (volume) option.

Parameters

max-depth

The max depth of the dependency tree to be traversed (by default 2):

docker run --rm -v "$PWD/pom.xml":"/xml/pom.xml" atomgraph/pom2rdf -s:/xml/pom.xml max-depth=1000 > doap.rdf

mvn-base-uri

The base URL that relative POM URLs (constructed from <groupId>/<artifactId>/<version>) are resolved against (by default https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/):

docker run --rm -v "$PWD/pom.xml":"/xml/pom.xml" atomgraph/pom2rdf -s:/xml/pom.xml mvn-base-uri=https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/releases/ > doap.rdf

snapshot-base-uri

The base URL that POM relative URLs of SNAPSHOT versions (constructed from <groupId>/<artifactId>/<version>) are resolved against (by default https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/):

docker run --rm -v "$PWD/pom.xml":"/xml/pom.xml" atomgraph/pom2rdf -s:/xml/pom.xml snapshot-base-uri=https://s01.oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/ > doap.rdf

Notes

The only POM expressions that will be recognized and replaced with a value are:

• <groupId>${project.groupId}</groupId>
• <artifactId>${project.artifactId}</artifactId>
• <version>${project.version}</version>

There is currently no support for Maven features such as parent POMs etc.

Any other expressions will lead to invalid Maven POM URLs and therefore will not be dereferenced and the dependency metadata will not be embedded.

SNAPSHOT versions are supported, their POMs are looked up in a different Maven repository (see snapshot-base-uri).

Cyclical dependencies are broken by not embedding any occurrence other than the first.

Output

The output is in the RDF/XML format. It uses the DOAP and doap-deps vocabularies.

A non-existing mvn: URI scheme is used to identify and reconcile artifacts and their versions, for example mvn:com.atomgraph:linkeddatahub.

Property doap:releaseOf is not defined by DOAP but is used as the inverse of doap:release.

Sample RDF output generated from LinkedDataHub's POM using max-depth=1.

Use cases

Software Bill of Materials

Software Bill of Materials is useful when the projects transitive dependencies need to be listed, for example to check for the Log4Shell vulnerability.

1. Set up Apache Jena CLI
2. Use POM2RDF to generate the doap.rdf file
3. Create sbom.rq with this SPARQL query string:

PREFIX doap: <http://usefulinc.com/ns/doap#>
PREFIX deps: <https://ontologi.es/doap-deps#>

SELECT DISTINCT ?project ?version ?subProject
{
    ?project deps:build-requirement/deps:on ?version .
    OPTIONAL
    {
        ?version doap:releaseOf ?subProject .
    }
}
ORDER BY ?project ?version

Generate the SBoM table by executing Jena's sparql command:

sparql --quiet --data=doap.rdf --query sbom.rq

To find Log4J usages, add grep:

sparql --quiet --data=doap.rdf --query sbom.rq | grep log4j