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PDF, English - main document Download (301kB) | Lizenz: Automated Software Metadata Conversion and Publication Based on CodeMeta by Houillon, Marie ; Klar, Jochen ; Stary, Tomas ; Loewe, Axel underlies the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

Abstract

Different metadata standards exist for different steps in the research software publication process. The Citation File Format (CFF) became very popular to provide information on how users are supposed to cite the software. For software archiving, DataCite is one of the established standards. The CodeMeta standard is an extension of schema.org specifically tailored to research software. All of these standards serve a purpose and are required for specific phases of the software lifecycle. However, research software developers should ideally not be burdened with maintaining a whole set of metadata files in different formats and largely overlapping content. This poses a risk both to data consistency and to adoption of good software publication practices in the first place.

Therefore, we developed Python pipelines that put the developers in a position to only maintain a CodeMeta file. CFF and DataCite files are automatically generated based on the CodeMeta file. The open source pipelines (https://www.openCARP.org/CI) can easily be integrated in continuous integration and deployment environments and are being successfully used for the openCARP project (https://www.openCARP.org). Further aspects of the software lifecycle that are covered by the set of continuous integration scripts are creation of tagged releases including the update of the metadata files, creation of BagIt and BagPack files, deposition of releases in the RADAR research data repository, and the synchronization of documentation files in the repository to the project's webpage. We believe the automated metadata conversion based on CodeMeta can be a useful tool for many research software developers and can facilitate the adoption of good software publication practices by reducing the effort for developers.