Published March 16, 2024 | Version v1
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Referencing software source code artifacts: identifiers for digital object

  • 1. INRIA
  • 2. CSC

Description

Software identification refers to multiple  practices depending if you focus more on describing (i.e. attributing credit to authors) or on referencing software. PIDs used to reference data sets, such as DOIs, are useful to reference a software as a project (i.e. the software as a concept, not a digital object). But referencing software artifacts (i.e. digital objects) with different levels of granularity calls for specific identifiers. Therefore identifiers in Software Heritage allow to reference a specific version of the source code of a project, at different levels of granularity: a snapshot, a release, a directory, down to a single file. 
SWHID are unique identifiers intrinsically bound to the software components. The difference between extrinsic and intrinsic identifiers lies in the way the relation between identifier and designated object is created and maintained. SWHID don’t rely on an external register. Thus, end-users can recompute identifiers on retrieved objects and verify the match.

Files

Use case Referencing.pdf

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Additional details

Dates

Other
2024-03-16