Research Ideas and Outcomes :
Conference Abstract
|
Corresponding author: Leyla Jael Castro (ljgarcia@zbmed.de)
Received: 08 Sep 2022 | Published: 12 Oct 2022
© 2022 Olga Giraldo, Renato Alves, Dimitrios Bampalikis, Jose Fernandez, Eva Martin del Pico, Fotis Psomopoulos, Allegra Via, Leyla Jael Castro
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Giraldo O, Alves R, Bampalikis D, Fernandez JM, Martin del Pico E, Psomopoulos FE, Via A, Castro LJ (2022) A FAIRification roadmap for ELIXIR Software Management Plans. Research Ideas and Outcomes 8: e94608. https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.8.e94608
|
Academic research requires careful handling of data plus any means to collect, transform and publish it, activities commonly supported by research software (from scripts to end-user applications). Data Management Plans (DMPs) are nowadays commonly requested by funders as part of good research practices. A DMP describes the data management lifecycle for the data corresponding to a research project, covering activities from collection to publication and preservation. To support and improve transparency, open science, reproducibility (and other *ilities), data needs to be accompanied by the software transforming it. Similar to DMPs, Software Management Plans (SMPs) can help formalize a set of structures and goals ensuring that the software is accessible and reusable in the short, medium and long term. DMPs and SMPs can be presented as text-based documents, guided by a set of questions corresponding to key points related to the lifecycle of either data or software.
A step forward for DMPs are the machine-actionable DMPs (maDMPs) proposed by the Research Data Alliance DMP Common Standards Working Group. A maDMP corresponds to a structured representation of the most common elements present in a DMP (
The ELIXIR SMP has been developed by the ELIXIR Software Development Best Practices Group in the ELIXIR Tools Platform to support researchers in life sciences (
The current version of the ELIXIR SMP includes seven sections: accessibility and licensing, documentation, testing, interoperability, versioning, reproducibility, and recognition. Each section includes questions guiding and supporting researchers so they cover key aspects of the software lifecycle relevant to their own case. To lower the barrier and make it easier for researchers, most questions are Yes/No with some few offering a set of options. In some cases, a URL is also requested, for instance regarding the location of the documentation for end-users. Our roadmap for ELIXIR SMPs to move from a text-based questionnaire to an FDO comprises four main steps:
Our maSMP application profile will include the semantic representation of the structured metadata that comes from the ELIXIR SMP. We will add granularity to the current root of the DCSO (dcso:DMP), by proposing the term SMP. In addition, we will propose the term ResearchSoftware as a dcso:Dataset. Terminology related to documentation, such as “Objective'' will also be considered. The objective is the Why the research software, which is crucial for their comprehensibility. We will propose the term DatasetObjective as the reason for the creation of a dataset. Source-codeRepository and Source-codeTesting are also good candidates to be part of the DCSO extension.
We will extend DCSO with new classes and properties as necessary to include the software related elements mentioned in the maSMP application profile. As the ELIXIR SMP targets the life science community, we will analyze the need to add links from DCSO to ontologies describing common operations, activities, and types in this domain. One important aspect is the creation of a mapping from DCSO to schema.org. Schema.org has become a popular choice to add lightway semantics to web pages but can also be used on its own to provide metadata describing all sorts of objects. In life sciences, Bioschemas (
Our final step for ELIXIR SMPs to become an FDO is using RO-Crates to package research software together with its metadata and link it to/from its corresponding SMP. To do so, we will create an RO-Crate profile capturing the metadata needed to describe software tools including elements from the SMP. It will become a versioned living crate as research software evolves with time, particularly when new releases are published. Thanks to the RO-Crate bundling nature, where digital objects are packed together with its metadata, a software crate enriched with the elements from the SMP are a good example of an FDO as all the critical information about a software tool is bound together in a unit that can be shared with peers via FAIR registries and repositories.
Software Management Plans, RO-Crates, Research Software, FAIR4RS
Leyla Jael Castro
First International Conference on FAIR Digital Objects, poster