Codemeta Generator

This repository contains a (client-side) web application to generate CodeMeta documents (aka. codemeta.json).

The CodeMeta initiative is a Free and Open Source academic collaboration creating a minimal metadata schema for research software and code.

The academic community recommends on adding a codemeta.json file in the root directory of your repository.

With this linked data metadata file, you can easily declare the authorship, include contextual information and link to other research outputs (publications, data, etc.).

Also, the codemeta.json file in your source code is indexed in the Software Heritage (SWH) archive, which will improve findability in searches.

References

• SWH guidelines for research software.

• SWH blog post about metadata indexation.

• Dan S. Katz's blog post about including metadata in your repository.

• FORCE11's Software Citation Implementation WG repository

• RDA & FORCE11's joint Software Source Code Identification WG repository

Specifications

Use case

1. create a complete codemeta.json file from scratch
2. aggregate existing information and add complementary information to a codemeta.json file

Functionalities

• helpers while completing the form, for example a reference list of spdx licenses
• a validation mechanism after submission
• the possibility to use all the codeMeta terms and schema.org terms
• accessible from multiple platforms (web browsers or OS)
• (extra) the possibility to correct the output after validation as part of the creation process

This tool was initially prepared for the FORCE19 Hackathon.

NB: codemeta v2.0 is generated by default, but v3.0 (v2.0 compatible) can be generated via a dedicated button.

Code contributions

This section only applies to developers who want to contribute to the Codemeta Generator. If you only want to use it, you can use the hosted version instead.

Code guidelines

This application is designed to work on popular modern browsers (Firefox, Chromium/Google Chrome, Edge, Safari). Check Caniuse for availability of features for these browsers.

To keep the architecture simple, we serve javascript files directly to browsers, without a compiler or transpiler.

Running local changes

To run Codemeta Generator, you just need an HTTP server serving the files (nginx, apache2, etc.).

The simplest way is probably to use Python's HTTP server:

shell git clone https://github.com/codemeta/codemeta-generator cd codemeta-generator python3 -m http.server

then open http://localhost:8000/ in your web browser.

Automatic testing

In addition to manual testing, we have automated tests to check for bugs quickly, using Cypress.

To run them, first install Cypress:

shell sudo apt install npm # or the equivalent on your system npx cypress@9.7.0 install

Then, run the tests:

shell npx cypress@9.7.0 run

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