TaskNav was a search engine specialized for API documentation that relied on natural language processing to find descriptions of programming tasks that one can do with an API and point users exactly to the sentence describing the task (for example, "change time zone"). TaskNav was a project of the Software Evolution Research Group (SWEVO) at McGill's School of Computer Science
The TaskNav application is no longer available due to the absence of the resources required to maintain it. For more information on this project please see below:
This article is the official report on the main technical contributions of the TaskNav project. Please refer to this article to cite the TaskNav project.
C. Treude, M. P. Robillard, and B. Dagenais. Extracting Development Tasks to Navigate Software Documentation. In IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 41(6):565-581, June 2015. (pdf) (doi link)
This blog by C. Treude provides an informal overview of the project.
The main contribution of TaskNav, the task extraction algorithm, is now available as a separate web application.
This paper provides a summary of the formal demonstration of TaskNav presented at the 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering.
C. Treude, M. Sicard, M. Klocke, and M. P. Robillard. TaskNav: Task-based Navigation of Software Documentation. Research Demonstration. In Proceedings of the 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 649-652, May 2015. (pdf) (doi link)
The image below is a view of the TaskNav application in action.
The following information was provided as a "quick start" guide for users of TaskNav.
Before entering your search item, select the projects you would like included in your search. Select by technology (e.g. Java), domain (e.g. Oracle) and subject (e.g. Concurrency). Multiple subjects, domains and technologies may be selected at once.
While you are entering your search terms, the autocomplete system will suggest tasks and code elements that match your search.
Once you have entered your search terms, TaskNav will show a list of search results that contain the tasks or code elements that match your search terms. In addition, TaskNav presents fulltext search results. After selecting a link, TaskNav automatically scrolls the corresponding page to the right place and highlights relevant information.
