We need your feedback: Aligning the CodeMeta vocabulary for scientific software with schema.org

Metadata that describes scientific software in standard ways – in particular citation metadata such as title, authors, publication year, and venue – is essential for proper software citation implementation. The metadata should be generated by the software author, stored in the code repository, included in submissions to journals, and archived with the source code in a software archive. The CodeMeta community has created such a standard vocabulary, with version 2.0 of the metadata schema released in 2017, and with mappings to common metadata standards for software source code, including DataCite metadata. Since that release, a task force of the Force11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group with co-chairs Morane Gruenpeter from Software Heritage and Martin Fenner from DataCite has worked on updating the schema to version 3.0, with a particular focus on aligning the CodeMeta schema with schema.org metadata.

The following terms in CodeMeta 2.0 are not (yet) part of schema.org:

• softwareSuggestions
• maintainer
• contIntegration
• buildInstructions
• developmentStatus
• embargoDate
• funding
• issueTracker
• referencePublication
• Readme

The CodeMeta Task Force of the Force11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group is now seeking community input via the CodeMeta GitHub issue tracker (summarized in https://github.com/codemeta/codemeta/issues/232). The task force asks for input until June 15, so that CodeMeta version 3.0 can ideally be finalized by July. After this work is done, the task force will propose the integration of all CodeMeta terms into the schema.org schema, so that CodeMeta becomes fully aligned with schema.org for better interoperability with existing documentation, tooling, and related communities. For any questions or comments that are not a good fit for the GitHub issue tracker, please reach out to the Task Force co-chairs Morane Gruenpeter and Martin Fenner via the Force11 Software Citation Implementation WG Homepage.

This blog post was originally published on the DataCite Blog.