ReSUS (Reusable Software University of Stuttgart) – Platform for publication, search, citation, and automated execution of research software

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Frank Leymann; Dr. Helge Steenweg
• Subject Area: Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 425911815

The project ReSUS (Reusable Software University of Stuttgart) aims to support researchers in the publishing, searching, citation and reuse of research software. For this purpose, a process shall be modeled and a platform implemented that assists the researcher in publishing as well as reusing research software.New findings in research usually build on existing knowledge. Apart from scientific publications and research data, this knowledge consists more and more of research software that was developed to solve problems, to create or analyze the data. An infrastructure to collect, curate, link and share scientific publications exists for a long time, but there is a lack of solutions for research software and its corresponding data. This is not only about archiving the software. To enable and ease the reuse of research software we need metadata models to find software, as well as methods to select and check licenses and cite a software. To enable automatic provision, the software shall be archived together with middleware and infrastructure components. To ensure findability, software and data have to be described with metadata. To choose an appropriate license for a software isn’t an easy task because the licenses of all dependent and included components of a software have to be taken into account.Within the project, a process will be modeled that offers an integrated approach for the tasks described above. Based on the TOSCA-standard, Research Object Archives (ROARs) will be modeled, administrated and published. ROARs combine data, software and licenses together with metadata and therefore contain all relevant components for provision and information for citation and findability. A license ontology, developed within the project, will give security to the researcher to choose a license for research software considering all components and dependencies. A platform, which can be integrated with existing repositories of libraries, will be developed to support the whole process and assist researchers in publishing, as well as in reusing research software together with data.

• DFG Programme: Science Communication, Research Data, eResearch (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)