Role of codemeta

[mfenner]

What role can the Codemeta project play in software citation implementation?

[cboettig]

Just brainstorming a few possible ideas.

1. Software discovery. More complete and more standard metadata mean it's easier to search for stuff (which is why search engines created schema.org in the first place). Being discoverable is prerequisite to being cited.

2. Transitive credit. codemeta facilitates tracking software dependency trees in a language-agnostic fashion, and also records authorship and other data a citation may require.

3. Distinguishing contributors (e.g. who may make a minor pull request) from software authors (who should be cited, even if contributing no actual coding)

[mfenner]

Thanks @cboettig, I like all three. Idea 2 might be the hardest to implement.

[mfenner]

The Force11 Software Citation Implementation WG is considering starting a task force that focusses on CodeMeta, in particular integrating it in existing tools and workflows. Please comment year (or respond on the mailing list) if you are interested in participating, and maybe also why. cc @cboettig @npch @danielskatz.

[sdruskat]

@mfenner @cboettig @npch @danielskatz I'm interested in participating.

Have just read through the DataCite software DOI blog post and am excited to hear that CodeMeta support is coming to Zenodo, and especially the Zenodo/GitHub integration! As the latter would be the perfect integration point also for getting possibly existing CFF-provided metadata into CodeMeta, I'd be more than happy to work on that (I think this would be a leap towards resolving #55), but happy to help with anything else as well.

[alee]

I would be interested in participating, we have codemeta integration on our short-term roadmap as well, generating codemeta from existing codebase metadata or vice versa comses/comses.net#351.

We would benefit from a simple Python API for codemeta that handles marshalling/unmarshalling codemeta between a coherent Python object graph and JSON. On cursory glance this isn't what https://github.com/proycon/codemetapy is focused on (generating codemeta from existing Python packages) but could potentially feed into it.

[moranegg]

I'm interested in the CodeMeta task force because I'm searching for tools providing a translation of software source code metadata into a consistent vocabulary.

With the CodeMeta crosswalk table we have an opportunity to read and translate metadata from different origins using different vocabularies/ontologies and have sufficient citation metadata without necessarily have the codemeta.json file (which is interesting when wishing to cite software that isn't academic software and where the authors are not concerned with software citation).

[dbouquin]

I'd be interested int he CodeMeta task force. The community of scientists I work with are actively trying to find better ways of sharing, reusing, and citing code and we're already working to promote the Zenodo/GitHub integration so this would be a great next step.