nfdi.software
Software Marketplace
Supported by NFDI Section:
Common Infrastructures
Phase: Initialisation
Service StewardHow to reach us
What is the Basic Service under development about?
nfdi.software aims to create a central marketplace to improve access to NFDI research software, addressing the needs of various scientific disciplines for sustainable research software use and development. It will link and coordinate independent developments within a federated data infrastructure, enhancing networking and contextualisation of research software as well as links to data and other research artefacts. The need for a central access point for research software of the NFDI consortia arises from the growing need of the scientific disciplines of the cultural sciences, humanities and social sciences, engineering and the natural and life sciences to ensure the sustainable use and further development. The platform will extract, standardise, and enrich metadata, and applies an AI approach, providing continuous monitoring of software relevance and acceptance by its users. By establishing standards and improving networking across the NFDI, the project will develop a 'Prototype for Integration' based on prior initiatives. As a central service, nfdi.software will harvest, aggregate and harmonise software metadata from NFDI consortia marketplaces and registries, and will provide back enriched and curated metadata in future.
Goals of the Initialisation phase
The nfdi.software proof-of-concept service includes a website and an API, providing an interface to search and discover research software via the NFDI. Identification of needs and community specific requirements will be collected in collaboration with consortia and basic services through workshops, discussions and prototyping. The 'Prototype for Integration' will feature functionalities for harvesting and retrieving information, offering detailed software data along with related publications, people, and projects. Existing tools like the Research Software Directory, bio.tools, the Research Software Ecosystem, Betty´s Research Software Engine and physics.tools will be integrated, and an advanced search and recommender system will be added. Various metadata vocabularies will be explored and discussed to develop a common cross-sector vocabulary. Metadata efforts like Knowledge Graphs and Jupyter4NFDI will be evaluated, with results documented in a concept and design report for feedback and improvement. The integration with IAM4NFDI is also planned to foster synergies.
Planned duration (current phase)
Begin: November 2024
Upcoming Events
Publications, presentations, workshops
