Software is critical to robust and efficient scientific discovery across disciplines, and yet is rarely valued or even understood. Researchers need to be able to discover and understand scientific software to apply it to their projects, but the approaches for documenting software are typically language specific and not interoperable. This project will have a broad impact on multiple disciplines by increasing the interoperability and consistency of software descriptions and by providing examples that illustrate the utility of interoperable software repositories for citation, discovery, archiving and preservation of scientific software. Research relies heavily on scientific software, and a large and growing fraction of researchers must now develop custom software to conduct their own research. Despite this, infrastructure to support the preservation, discovery, reuse, and attribution of software lags substantially behind that of other research products such as journal articles and research data. This frustrates the progress of science in several ways: lacking a way to discover and access software written by other researchers means that multiple teams must re-invent the same wheel. Limited re-use or accreditation of software also discourages researchers from investing more time to improve the performance, reliability or usability of the software they write. This lag is driven not so much by a lack of technology as it is by a lack of unity: existing mechanisms to archive, document, index, share, discover, and cite software contributions are varied among research disciplines and among software archives, and rarely consistent with best practices. The project will convene key stakeholders from software and data repositories to address this issue by aligning existing software metadata approaches. This alignment of software documentation will increase the efficiency and scale or research across disciplines, and simplify the process for researchers to collaborate on interdisciplinary projects.
This project will have three distinct phases:
1. Define a crosswalk table between exiting metadata schema for software
2. Develop prototype applications illustrating the value of crosswalk metadata
3. Assess and communicate impact of results.
The researchers will convene a meeting of repository and science stakeholders to harmonize approaches to software metadata. Rather than try and define yet another standard, they will map the correspon...
This project will have three distinct phases:
1. Define a crosswalk table between exiting metadata schema for software
2. Develop prototype applications illustrating the value of crosswalk metadata
3. Assess and communicate impact of results.
The researchers will convene a meeting of repository and science stakeholders to harmonize approaches to software metadata. Rather than try and define yet another standard, they will map the correspon...