This topic is dedicated to the design of the Software Catalogues feature in ScienceSoft. The general idea is to provide access to a large collection of software products (applications, tools, tests, etc) with information about the authors, the support options, the repositories where the software can be taken from, links to documentation, etc.
The questions to be answered first in my opinion are:
- How to describe a software product? We need a schema, does it exist already? Can we use anything from models like CIM or similar descriptions? What are the relationships with other entities like authors, projects and collaborations, institutes, companies, etc?
- How to implement the catalogue? The ScienceSoft web site currently runs on Drupal and a simple implementation can be done using standard Drupal features. However, this may not scale? What about data import/export? APIs?
- Where to take the data from? Of course one source is direct human registration, but can we use any existing database? Several suggestions have been provided already, among which: the EGI Application Database, Ohloh.net, the "Projet PLUME" at CNRS in France, the OpenScience Project in the US and others. How can we extract/merge/moderate/validate information?
We can start with a simple Drupal taxonomy and a form just to see how it looks, but a more long-term design is necessary.
If you want to contribute to this discussion, feeel free to reply to this topic or create more specific topics.