Mapping ISO 19115-1 geographic metadata standards to CodeMeta

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2019 Feb 4:5:e174. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.174. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

The CodeMeta Project recently proposed a vocabulary for software metadata. ISO Technical Committee 211 has published a set of metadata standards for geographic data and many kinds of related resources, including software. In order for ISO metadata creators and users to take advantage of the CodeMeta recommendations, a mapping from ISO elements to the CodeMeta vocabulary must exist. This mapping is complicated by differences in the approaches used by ISO and CodeMeta, primarily a difference between hard and soft typing of metadata elements. These differences are described in detail and a mapping is proposed that includes sixty-four of the sixty-eight CodeMeta V2 terms. The CodeMeta terms have also been mapped to dialects used by twenty-one software repositories, registries and archives. The average number of terms mapped in these cases is 11.2. The disparity between these numbers reflects the fact that many of the dialects that have been mapped to CodeMeta are focused on citation or dependency identification and management while ISO and CodeMeta share additional targets that include access, use, and understanding. Addressing this broader set of use cases requires more metadata elements.

Keywords: CodeMeta; Crosswalk; ISO metadata; Metadata; Software citation.

Associated data

  • figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.7430282.v1

Grants and funding

All of this material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. NSFDACS11C1675 and by NASA/GSFC under Raytheon Co. contract number NNG15HZ39C. There was no additional external funding received for this study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.