find.software: Foundations for Interdisciplinary Discovery of (Research) Software

In nearly all fields of research, many aspects of the research process depend on software. However, it is difficult to find suitable software for a given research task. find.software develops a community-driven system that helps potential users find software that matches their research needs. The system will provide software developers with mechanisms to make their software discoverable for research tasks and highlight mismatches between software supply and demand for specific tasks.

To this end, we will document how various stakeholders of the research landscape have been searching for – or stumbling upon – research software so far, identify variables associated with successful search outcomes, and build workflows that assist in describing software and associated concepts in a standardized fashion. These descriptions will then be aligned across various sources of relevant information and integrated into Wikidata, the knowledge graph that anyone can edit and that already contains considerable breadth and depth of information related to research, software, and their interactions.

While keeping an eye on similar approaches to software discovery that might work in parts of the research ecosystem, existing Wikidata content and workflows will be reviewed and built upon. Additional documentation, tooling and workflows will be developed to enrich, expand, curate, query, and explore this content, both for specific use cases and with ongoing engagement of the communities involved in research software, open data, or collaborative curation. Over the course of three years, the project will seek to establish a dedicated community that oversees a well-documented, smoothly running infrastructure for software discovery. The project will also devise a plan for sustaining this infrastructure in the long term.