Wolfgang Dalitz

Software Products, Software Versions, Archiving of Software, and swMATH

Management of software information is difficult for various reasons. First, software typically cannot be reduced to a single object: information about software is an aggregate of software code, APIs, documentation, installations guides, tutorials, user interfaces, test data, dependencies on hardware and other software, etc. Moreover, secondary information about software, especially use cases and experience with employing the software, is important to communicate. Second, typically named software, which we term here a ‘software product’, is taken to stand for all versions of the software which can have different features and properties and may produced different results from the same input data. Software production is a dynamic process and software development is, increasingly, widely distributed. Therefore GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and other platforms for sharing are used. Information about software is alos provided in different locations, on websites, repositories, portals, etc. Each resource provides information about software from a particular point of view, but the information is often not linked together. Therefore swMATH has developed a conception which covers portals and a search engines for mathematical software, persistent and citable landing pages for specific software, and a method for software archiving. Based on the publication-based approach, swMATH collects and analyses semi-automatically the existing information about mathematical software found on the Web and makes it available in a user-oriented way. In the talk, we discuss recent extensions of the swMATH conception. We focus on the connection between the swMATH landing pages and different repositories for software.

Design, concepts, and state of the art of the swMATH service

In this paper, the concepts and design for an efficient information service for mathematical software and further mathematical research data are presented. The publication-based approach and the web-based approach are the main building blocks of the service and will be discussed. Heuristic methods are used for identification, extraction, and ranking of information about software and other mathematical research data. The methods provide not only information about the research data but also link software and mathematical research data to the scientific context.