What do you want to know about research software? - Find out at the Software Graph Hackathon


Author: Frances Madden (British Library)

It is reasonably well known at this point that research software has value and should be treated as a citable output in research but how much software is actually cited and how does it relate to other types of research output? These are just a couple of questions which the Persistent Identifier (PID) Graph can help to answer. The PID Graph is a concept which provides an opportunity to discover the background and relationships between different types of research outputs including articles, datasets and software as well as their authors, organisations and funding. For example, from the PID Graph we can understand relationships between different entities which are not directly connected.

From the blog post BL on the software hackathon

This concept has been realised as an API, using GraphQL, created by DataCite. An initial version of this API covering the DataCite, Crossref and ORCID APIs was released in June 2019 with the possibility of creating visualisations in Jupyter Notebooks. It is hoped to expand this to cover more sources and to develop the visualisation capability.

From the blog post BL on the software hackathon

This hackathon, hosted by the FREYA project, The British Library and the Software Sustainability Institute in December 2019 seeks to characterise the range of coverage of the PID Graph of software outputs and understand its growth over time. The PID Graph API has been developed within the FREYA project and this hackathon will provide an opportunity to identify any new functionality required to make the PID graph useful for creators and administrators of software.

To help with planning the hackathon we want to hear from you with ideas of how you would like to use the PID Graph. What types of information would  you like to know about your research software? Where else has been it cited and used? What are the relationships between different versions of software? Something else entirely - let us know on Twitter @freya_eu or @SoftwareSaved or email info[at]project-freya.eu. 

Also please sign up to take part in this hackathon - it's going to take place at the British Library in Central London on 4 December 2019 but it is possible to attend remotely too. Places are limited so please register here - https://www.eventbrite.com/e/software-graph-hackathon-tickets-75300571035

From the blog post BL on the software hackathon

Photo by Anastasia Dulgier on Unsplash

Please note that this blog post will be cross posted on the Software Sustainability Institute’s blog at https://software.ac.uk/blog