Document software by specifying metadata

What This Task Involves

The training session and training materials indicate how to:

• Describe your software so that others can find it and use it by describing metadata to:
  1. Uniquely identify the software
  2. Understand what the software does
  3. Run the software
  4. Do research with the software
  5. Get support if you have questions or find bugs
  6. Contribute to the development of the software

Training Materials

This training session will be held on May 1, 2015:

• Presentation: Documenting software by specifying metadata

Suggested Readings

• "OntoSoft: Capturing Scientific Software Metadata". Yolanda Gil, Varun Ratnakar, and Daniel Garijo. Proceedings of the Eighth ACM International Conference on Knowledge Capture, Palisades, NY, October 2015.

• OntoSoft project description

• OntoSoft ontology

What To Do

• Describe your software using the GeoSoft software registry
  • You do not need to log in
  • Select "Software" from the top, then select "Publish your software"
  • It will show you a roadmap of 6 categories and when you select one it will walk you through questions
  • Special features:
    • If your software is in GitHub, once you provide the URL then GeoSoft will extract some metadata automatically from GitHub and ask you if you want to incorporate it
  • If your software is described in CSDMS or in the NOAAA NCDC repository, it will already be in the system
  • Save the responses when you are done
  • GeoSoft is still a prototype, we appreciate your comments and feedback!
• Once you are done, click on the name of the software
  • At the top you will be able to download an HTML page with the description of the software, which you can put in your code page or project page
  • You can also download RDF/XML or JSON if you prefer