find.software

Foundations for Interdisciplinary Discovery of (Research) Software

From our grant proposal:

Across essentially all fields of research, many aspects of the respective research processes~-- whether experimental, theoretical, empirical, or outright computational~-- are closely related to software. Yet the process of finding software that is directly suitable or at least a good starting point for a given research task is cumbersome. This project aims to develop a community-driven system that provides potential users of research software with a diversity of pathways towards actually finding software that closely matches their research needs if such software exists. Conversely, it will provide software developers with mechanisms to make their software findable for research-related tasks, and it will highlight mismatches between software supply and demand for specific tasks. To this end, we will document how various stakeholders of the research landscape have been searching for~-- or stumbling upon~-- research software so far, identify variables associated with successful search outcomes, and build workflows that assist in describing software and associated concepts in a standardized fashion. These descriptions will then be aligned across various sources of relevant information and integrated into Wikidata, the knowledge graph that anyone can edit and that already contains considerable breadth and depth of information related to research, software, and their interactions. While keeping an eye on similar approaches to software discovery that might work in parts of the research ecosystem, existing Wikidata content and workflows will be reviewed and built upon. Additional documentation, tooling and workflows will be developed to enrich, expand, curate, query, and explore this content, both for specific use cases and with ongoing engagement of the communities involved in research software, open data, or collaborative curation. Within its three years, the project seeks to establish a dedicated community overseeing a well-documented and smoothly running infrastructure for software discovery and to devise a plan for how this can be sustained for the longer term.

Setup

To install the project, follow these steps:

1. Fork main branch into your personal repository.

2. Clone this repository to your local machine using the following command in a terminal.

   git clone
   

3. After cloning, go to its root directory and install poetry. And then run poetry install to install its dependencies for MkDocs and Material for MkDocs on your local machine using pip. Therefore run these commands:

   pipx install poetry
   poetry install 
   

4. Preview your changes locally use the command

   poetry run mkdocs serve
   

   This will start a local web server to view your documentation in a web browser by opening the given localhost address.

5. Convert your Markdown files into HTML and generate a series of static files.

   poetry run mkdocs build
   

6. Then add, commit and push your changes back to the repository and let woodpecker do the magic.

Contributing

We welcome feedback and suggestions for improvement of any kind. See Contributing for further instructions.

Copyright and Licence

Copyright (c) 2025, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research GmbH - UFZ

Documentation: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

For full details, see LICENSE.

Acknowledgements

DFG