Working Group Research Software Metadata
Research software is used for research in many areas of science and is itself sometimes the subject of research. Many NFDI consortia cover research software as an important research artifact and want it to meet the FAIR criteria in order to increase transparency, reproducibility, and reusability in software-based research.
For research software to meet the FAIR criteria, it must be described with meaningful and interoperable metadata. Although metadata schemas for research software exist (e.g. CodeMeta), they have limitations such as missing elements and a lack of semantic interoperability. This working group has set itself the goal of providing a comprehensive metadata vocabulary for research software that is compatible with existing standards such as schema.org and CodeMeta, and will support all NFDI consortia in applying and establishing metadata schemas for research software, including the development of domain-specific extensions.
- Contact persons: Stephan Ferenz, Leyla Jael Castro
Resources
- Working Group Charter on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10246218
Mailing list
Coordinators
- Stephan Ferenz (OFFIS) — stephan.ferenz@offis.de
- Leyla Jael Castro (ZB Med) — ljgarcia@zbmed.de
Publications and Outreach
- Castro, L. J., Ferenz, S., Hajiabadi, H., Kuckertz, P., Löbe, M., Schmidt, C., Struck, A., & Thiery, F. (2024). Results on a Survey on Research Software Metadata in the NFDI Consortia. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15674520
- Ferenz, S., Castro, L. J., Hajiabadi, H., Löbe, M., Stervbo, U., Gan, L., & Thiery, F. (2025, August 4). Towards Common Metadata For Research Software in the NFDI. 2nd Conference on Research Data Infrastructure (CoRDI), Aachen, Germany. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16735848