find.software: Foundations for Interdisciplinary Discovery of (Research) Software

• Applicants: Dr.-Ing. Jan Bumberger; Dr. Oliver Karras; Dr. Moritz Schubotz
• Subject Area: Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing ; Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics ; Methods in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning ; Mathematics ; Software Engineering and Programming Languages
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 567156310

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.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)