ERSmeta: A Metadata schema to describe energy research software

ERSmeta is a metadata schema designed to facilitate the discovery, sharing, and reuse of energy research software. The schema provides a standardized way to describe the metadata associated with energy research software, including its purpose, functionality, and usage.

ERSmeta is based on CodeMeta and also reuses elements from metadata4ing, the open energy ontology (OEO), the Software Description Ontology, and ontosoft.

Provided Formats

ERSmeta is provided in two formats:

SHACL

A SHACL formalization can be found as turtle file. It contains all constrains of the metadata schema.

JSON-LD

The metadata schema is also provided as JSON/JSON-LD. It consists of the JSON schema and the context file. The context for JSON-LD can be found in this file. It maps all elements to semantic web items.

The JSON schema can be found in this file. This schema includes less constrains than the SHACL formalization since some constrains can not be formalized in JSON, e.g., the limitation of a value of element to a certain ontology class.

Documentation

A general description of the metadata schema can be found on its documentation website. The documentation is automatically build from the SHACL formalization. Also, a description of all properties and a description of all used types (and their properties) are provided in this repository. In extension to the SHACL formalization, we add three different priority levels to the elements in the description of all properties: mandatory, recommended, and bonus.

Crosswalks

We created crosswalks to the following metadata schemas: * CodeMeta * CFF * Software Description Ontology * DataDesc * Open Energy Platform Framework Factsheets

All crosswalks are available in the subfolder crosswalks.

Background

Energy research software is defined as "software used in the scientific discovery process for understanding, analyzing, improving, and designing energy systems" by Ferenz et al. 2023.

The metadata schema is based on an extensive requirement analysis. In this requirement analysis, interviews with around 30 researchers were performed to gather insides which information are relevant for energy researchers when looking for software.

How you can help

We welcome help to improve the schema and/or its documentation! Please open up issues or send us a pull request if you have any updates to our schema or crosswalks!

Hints on Validating Metadata against the Metadata Schema

If you have metadata as RDF or JSON and want to validate it against the schema we recommend the following tools: * RDF - SHACL validation: https://shacl-playground.zazuko.com/ * JSON - JSON schema validation: https://www.jsonschemavalidator.net/

Information for Developers

We recommend the following tools for testing and verifying during the development: * For JSON-LD: https://json-ld.org/playground/

License

ERSmeta is released under the CC0 1.0 Universal license.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the German Federal Government, the German State Governments, and the Joint Science Conference (GWK) for their funding and support as part of the NFDI4Energy consortium. The work was partly funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) – 501865131 within the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI).