CodeMeta

CodeMeta is a joint project by several science and industry actors to create minimal metadata schemas for science software and code.

The CodeMeta initiative created a concept vocabulary based on Schema.org SoftwareSourceCode class to standardize the exchange of software metadata across repositories and organizations.

The crosswalk table is its most valuable component which can facilitate translation between ontologies and metadata standards.

Choosing a metadata strategy by choosing a vocabulary

In the effort of harmonizing metadata :

1. should we strive to contain all domains, every use case and every exception?

2. should we keep only the vital minimum for discovery and citation?

We started by choosing a vocabulary we could translate the metadata we discovered.

CodeMeta advantages

CodeMeta showed very important advantages, especially when trying to harmonize the diversity of metadata:

• most of the terms used are directly taken from schema.org which is practical for producing linked data.
• the crosswalk table is very useful for translating
• from one ontology to another the CodeMeta community is active and the ontology is maintained

For these advantages and in the hope that tools using CodeMeta will be available in the future it seems that the CodeMeta vocabulary is most appropriate for keeping metadata in the SWH archive.

CodeMeta tools

We developed the swh-metadata-translator to provide a translation of the discovered metadata into CodeMeta.

View which package management files can be translated on Best practices using metadata

Other tools compatible with CodeMeta vocabulary are available on the tools page

References

• CodeMeta homepage
• CodeMeta GitHub repository