Towards Building a CyberInfrastructure for Facilitating the Assessment, Dissemination, Discovery, & Reuse of Software and Data Products

Ritu Arora, Subhashini Sivagnanam
2022 Zenodo  
Over the last several years, the projects funded through the various NSF programs, such as the Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI), Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBs), and Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) programs, have resulted in innovative software and data products with broad societal impacts. Collecting the information on the short-term and long-term impact of these products on their intended user communities in terms of
more » ... metrics can be important for future funding decisions, and hence is in national interest. However, collecting such information can be a challenging task given the diversity of the NSF-funded products, their usage environments, and their target audiences. Additionally, when a product is composed of (or integrated with) other products, it can be difficult to capture the provenance trail of all the embedded products, which impacts the process of gathering the metrics necessary in evaluating their success. Moreover, the knowledge of the entire technology stack used in a product can enable other developers or adopters of that product in analyzing the code reuse and integration cost. When analyzing the feasibility of integrating software products, or interoperating with them, or extending them, it is also important to check the compatibility of their licenses and software stacks so that one can determine if the products can interoperate legally and seamlessly, and if the derived products can be disseminated as intended. It can be time-consuming to carefully review and understand the impact of the licenses of the base products on any derived product, or to check if one product can co-exist or interoperate with another product. Hence, having a central and a publicly accessible infrastructure for (1) tracking the metrics of the NSF-funded products, (2) checking their license and software stack compatibility, and (3) discovering the software stack and its evolution, can be useful for quantifying the societal impacts of the NSF-fund [...]
doi:10.5281/zenodo.6848754 fatcat:ooputimnfbdjpflgjaw4eodzue