COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: EAGER: Towards Building a CyberInfrastructure for Facilitating the Assessment, Dissemination, Discovery, & Reuse of Software and Data Products

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Over the last several years, the projects funded through the various NSF programs, such as the Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI), Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBs), and Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) programs, have resulted in innovative software and data products with broad societal impacts. Collecting the information on the short-term and long-term impact of these products on their intended user communities in terms of quantifiable metrics can be important for future funding decisions, and hence is in national interest. However, collecting such information can be a challenging task given the diversity of the NSF-funded products, their usage environments, and their target audiences. Additionally, when a product is composed of (or integrated with) other products, it can be difficult to capture the provenance trail of all the embedded products, which impacts the process of gathering the metrics necessary in evaluating their success. Moreover, the knowledge of the entire technology stack used in a product can enable other developers or adopters of that product in analyzing the code reuse and integration cost. When analyzing the feasibility of integrating software products, or interoperating with them, or extending them, it is also important to check the compatibility of their licenses and software stacks so that one can determine if the products can interoperate legally and seamlessly, and if the derived products can be disseminated as intended. It can be time-consuming to carefully review and understand the impact of the licenses of the base products on any derived product, or to check if one product can co-exist or interoperate with another product. Hence, having a central and a publicly accessible infrastructure for (1) tracking the metrics of the NSF-funded products, (2) checking their license and software stack compatibility, and (3) discovering the software stack and its evolution, can be useful for quantifying the societal impacts of the NSF-funded products and in promoting their dissemination. The overarching goal of this project is to develop a software infrastructure for facilitating the assessment, discovery, dissemination, and reuse of publicly accessible software and data products. As a preliminary step towards meeting this goal, this project has initiated research and development activities for prototyping: (1) iTracker: the software infrastructure for tracking the user-defined metrics of products released and deployed on different platforms & computing environments, (2) CompChecker: a license and software-stack compatibility checker for advising the users on the feasibility of integrating or interoperating with existing products, and (3) Discovery Catalog: a prototype of a catalog of NSF-funded products which can display the most recent information captured by iTracker for each product of interest and integrate CompChecker as a feature. The project demonstrates the use of block-chain for securely storing an immutable copy of the metadata related to the cataloged products and this metadata can in turn be useful for tracking the evolution of the products during their life cycle. The project demonstrates the infrastructure required for identifying and promoting the relevant metrics for evaluating different categories of products. The project has the potential of encouraging the developer community to adopt best practices for product dissemination and will likely foster cross-disciplinary collaborations.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.