Crosswalks of Research Software Metadata Schemas to CodeMeta

This dataset provides crosswalk mappings of 21 metadata schemas, vocabularies, and ontologies to the CodeMeta metadata schema. The mappings were created to analyze the research software metadata landscape and to support the development of a unified metadata schema for ConnOSS project.

The dataset includes mappings for 68 metadata properties derived from CodeMeta and schema.org. These properties cover a broad range of metadata concepts used to describe research software.

Mappings were established based on semantic equivalence between metadata concepts. The mapping process was conducted collaboratively, including iterative review and refinement to ensure consistency and completeness.

Release notes v1.1.0 (DOI:10.5281/zenodo.21718079): 

• [Update] The crosswalks summary table (CodeMeta Crosswalk Summary in CSV, TSV, ODS and XLSX formats) includes two modifications: (i) from R package, the mapped property to codemeta:review was removed ([rev] in Author). and in biotoolsXSD, the mapped property to codemeta:editor was removed ("credit" - typeRole:Documentor)
• [Addition] Individual crosswalks as CSV files for each target resource are now included
  • Files are named as "<target resource name> - Crosswalk CodeMeta.csv"
  • 21 target resources are: AlgoOnto (version 0.1), BARTOC, Biotools (version 3.3.0) [DOI:10.1186/s13059-019-1772-6], Citation File Format (CFF) (version 1.2.0) [DOI:10.5281/zenodo.1003149], DataCite Metadata Schema (version 4.6) [DOI:10.14454/mzv1-5b55], DataDesc (version 1.1), DCAT (version 3), Description Of A Project (DOAP), ERSMeta, HITO (version 22.10) [DOI:10.2196/38861], Java maven pom (version 4.0.0), machine-actionable Software Management Plans (maSMP) (version 2.1.1) [DOI:10.5281/zenodo.7806638], OntoSoft (version 1.0.1)  [DOI:10.1109/eScience.2016.7870916], Python Package Metadata (version 2.5), R Package Metadata (version 4.5.2), RSD Data Model, Software Description Ontology  (version 1.9.0) [DOI:10.1109/eScience.2019.00046], Software Ontology (version 2023-03-05) [DOI:10.1186/2041-1480-5-25], SPDX Software Artifact (version 3.0.1), swMath (version 1.8.3) [DOI:10.12752/8009], Wikidata Software
  • Column 1: name of the reference property (always present, see note at the end of this list)
  • Column 2: range of the reference property (always present, see note at the end of this list)
  • Column 3: description of the referenceproperty (always present, see note at the end of this list)
  • Column 4: comment about inclusion in CodeMeta
  • Column 5: empty (acting as separator for visual purposes for annotators)
  • Column 6: name of the mapped property in the corresponding target resource
  • Column 7: range of the mapped property in the corresponding target resource
  • Column 8: description of the mapped property in the corresponding target resource
  • Column 9: comment about the mapped property
  • Column 10: matching type (close match, exact match, narrower match, broader match)
  • Note: For grouping purposes, if Column 1 is the only one with a value in a given row, it acts as a title indicating the schema.org or CodeMeta type corresponding to the domain for the property
• [Note] Column 10 in the individual crosswalks follows the matching types proposed by the approach "A Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM)"  [DOI:10.1093/database/baac035]. It was added by the ConnOSS team as part of the reviewing process for all crosswalks. 

Acknowledgements

This work has been created as part of the activities of the Research Software Metadata Working Group in the NFDI Section Metadata, Terminologies and Provenance of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). This work has received funding from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) under grant No. 561044496, corresponding to the project Connected Open-Source Software (ConnOSS). Participants from the Research Software Metadata Working Group also acknolwedge DFG grants No. 441958017 corresponding to NFDI4Culture, No. 460234259 corresponding to NFDI4DataScience, No. 501865131 corresponding to NFDI4Energy, and No. 501875662 corresponding to NFDI4Immuno.

The crosswalks were used in the workshop "Towards a Community-based Extension for Research Software Metadata from the German research community " part of the 6th Conference for Research Software Engineering in Germany in Stuttgart on 05-March-2026.