Code as a research object: (new phase) standardizing software metadata by Abigail Cabunoc.
From the post:
At the Science Lab, we want to help research thrive on the open web. Part of this is working with other community members to build technical prototypes that move science on the web forward. Earlier this year we saw several prototypes come out of the ‘Code as a Research Object’ collaboration. Since then, there’s been more conversation and effort in this space and we wanted to share our progress and invite the community to give input.
First, a quick look at ‘Code as a Research Object’
Late last year, “Code as a Research Object” was first announced as a new collaboration between the Science Lab, GitHub, figshare and Zenodo to help explore how to better integrate code and scientific software into the scholarly workflow. Since then, we’ve seen community members come together to build prototypes allowing users to easily get a DOI for their code, making it citable and easier to incorporate into the existing credit system.
Next Steps: Standardizing Metadata
Coming into the conversation, there’s still room for best practices for code reuse and citation. In particular, some form of standardized metadata would help other repositories understand how they can integrate with current systems.
When I was at NCEAS Open Science CodeFest (OSCodeFest) last month, I led a discussion around the work being done here. I was joined by Matt Jones, Carly Strasser and Corinna Gries, and we agreed that some standards need to be set to help more groups store software in a citable and interoperable manner.
Building on the existing discussions and proposals in the community, we compared the exiting schemas for code storage to help create a metadata standard that allows for discoverability, reuse and citation. You can see the notes from our discussion here.
This led to the creation of the codemeta GitHub repo to store a minimal metadata schema for science software in code in JSON-LD and XML. Since then, we’ve worked on refining the proposed metadata schema and creating mappings between some existing popular data stores. Coming soon: Matt Jones will be blogging on some of the more technical aspects of this project.
How to get involved
We’re looking for feedback on our current proposed metadata schema for code discovery, reuse and citation.
- Codemeta GitHub repo and issue tracker: take a look and let us know what you think. Feel free to create issues and pull requests!
- Join the discussion:
Here is your chance to contribute to a metadata standard for some sub-set of all software.
I say a sub-set because one of the certainties of standards is that if an area needs standardization there are going to be multiple, evolving standards for it.
That’s not a criticism of standards (I actively work on several) but statement about the reality of standards. They are useful even though very few ever become universal.