Codemeta: A Rosetta Stone for Metadata in Scientific Software

软件对于跨学科的强健和高效的科学发现是至关重要的，然而很少被重视甚至理解。研究人员需要能够发现和理解科学软件，以便将其应用到他们的项目中，但是记录软件的方法通常是特定于语言的，并且不可互操作。该项目将通过增加软件描述的互操作性和一致性，并通过提供举例说明互操作软件存储库在科学软件的引用、发现、归档和保存方面的效用，对多个学科产生广泛的影响。研究在很大程度上依赖于科学软件，而且越来越多的研究人员现在必须开发定制软件来进行他们自己的研究。尽管如此，支持软件保存、发现、重用和归属的基础设施远远落后于其他研究产品，如期刊文章和研究数据。这在几个方面阻碍了科学的进步：缺乏发现和访问其他研究人员编写的软件的方法意味着多个团队必须重新发明同一个轮子。有限的软件重用或认证也阻碍了研究人员投入更多时间来改进他们编写的软件的性能、可靠性或可用性。这种滞后与其说是由于缺乏技术，不如说是由于缺乏统一：现有的存档、文档、索引、共享、发现和引用软件贡献的机制在研究学科和软件存档之间是不同的，并且很少与最佳实践一致。该项目将召集来自软件和数据存储库的关键利益相关者，通过调整现有的软件元数据方法来解决这个问题。软件文档的这种一致性将提高跨学科研究的效率和规模，并简化研究人员在跨学科项目上合作的过程。该项目将分为三个不同的阶段：为software2在现有元数据模式之间定义一个crosswalk表。开发原型应用程序，说明人行横道元数据的价值。评估和沟通结果的影响。研究人员将召开存储库和科学利益相关者会议，以协调软件元数据的方法。他们不会尝试去定义另一个标准，而是映射出已经在使用的标准之间的对应关系——软件元数据的罗塞塔石碑。在这个过程中，研究人员将确定指导现有软件元数据描述的元数据用例（例如，安装软件可能需要比引用它更多或不同的元数据，甚至更多的元数据来扩展它），然后就每个用例需要哪些元数据概念达成一致。这个阶段将识别一些现有软件存储库不完全支持的用例（例如，Zenodo对将软件与资助者作为用例相关联很感兴趣，但还不识别资助者标识符）。这将为第二阶段奠定基础，在第二阶段中，crosswalk表将用于协调支持软件沉积的三个主要存储库（KNB、Zenodo、Figshare）中的软件元数据的实现。研究人员将修改DataONE联盟中使用的软件和来源元数据术语，使其与人行横道可互操作，并创建一个工具，用于生成和上传带有此元数据的软件到KNB存储库（DataONE的成员存储库）。协作者将扩展软件存储库GitHub与数据存储库Zenodo和figshare之间的现有集成，以提供可互操作的软件元数据。在最后阶段，团队将在相关的科学会议上与研究人员进行评估，以评估人行横道对已确定的软件用例的有效性，并将结果总结在一篇科学论文中。

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 software2. Develop prototype applications illustrating the value of crosswalk metadata3. 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 correspondences between standards already in use -- a Rosetta stone of software metadata. In this process, the investigators will identify metadata use cases that have guided existing software metadata descriptions (e.g. more or different metadata may be needed to install software than to cite it, and even more to extend it), and then agree upon which metadata concepts are needed for each use case. This phase will identify some use cases that are not fully supported by existing software repositories (for instance, Zenodo is interested in associating software with funders as a use case but does not recognize funder identifiers yet). This will set the stage for the second phase where the crosswalk table will be used to harmonize the implementation of software metadata in three major repositories that support software deposition (KNB, Zenodo, Figshare). The researchers will modify the software and provenance metadata terms used in the DataONE federation to be interoperable with the crosswalk, and create a tool for generating and uploading software with this metadata to the KNB repository (a member repository of DataONE). Collaborators will extend the existing integration between the software repository GitHub and the data repositories Zenodo and figshare to provide interoperable software metadata. In the final phase, the team will conduct an assessment with researchers at a relevant scientific meeting to evaluate the effectiveness of the crosswalk for the identified software use cases and will summarize results in a scientific paper.