| NSF Org: |
RISE Integrative and Collaborative Education and Research (ICER) |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 14, 2014 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | August 14, 2014 |
| Award Number: | 1440323 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Eva Zanzerkia
RISE Integrative and Collaborative Education and Research (ICER) GEO Directorate for Geosciences |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2014 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2018 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $1,048,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $1,048,000.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
3720 S FLOWER ST FL 3 LOS ANGELES CA US 90033 (213)740-7762 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001 Marina del Rey CA US 90292-6611 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | EarthCube |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.050 |
ABSTRACT
Geosciences software embodies crucial scientific knowledge, and as such it should be explicitly captured, curated, managed, and disseminated. The goal of this project is to create a system for software stewardship in geosciences that will empower scientists to manage their software as valuable scientific assets. Scientific software stewardship requires a combination of cyberinfrastructure, social infrastructure, and professional development infrastructure. The framework will result in an open transparent and broader access to scientific software to other scientists, software professionals, students, and decision makers. It will significantly improve the adoption of open data and open software initiatives, improve reproducibility, and advance scientific scholarship.
The proposed research will advance knowledge and understanding of scientific software as a valuable community asset that is worth sharing, curating, cataloging, validating, reusing, and maintaining.
1) Facilitating software publication through TurboSoft, a personal assistant (analogous to TurboTax) that guides a user through best practices. Users will choose the degree of investment they are willing to make in componentizing, describing, licensing, and maintaining their software. The system will encourage open source publication, the formation of communities around the software, and set up mechanisms for software citation and credit.
2) Enabling broad software dissemination through GeoSoft, a "software commons" for geosciences that will support software contributions (prepared through TurboSoft or otherwise), software discovery through multi-faceted search, and foster social interactions through dynamic formation of communities of interest. GeoSoft will interoperate with existing software repositories and modeling frameworks in geosciences.
3) Providing just-in-time training materials through GeoCamp, an annotated collection of educational units ranging from basic education to professional training on all aspects of software stewardship. GeoCamp will be seamlessly integrated with TurboSoft and GeoSoft, and present a wide range of options for learning in the context of a user?s context of interaction with the framework or independently.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Geosciences software embodies crucial scientific knowledge, and as such it should be explicitly captured, managed, and disseminated. The goal of this project was to improve software stewardship in geosciences by empowering scientists to manage their software as valuable scientific assets. Scientific software stewardship requires a combination of cyberinfrastructure, social infrastructure, and professional development infrastructure. Software stewardship practices give open transparent and broader access to scientific software to other scientists, software professionals, students, and decision makers.
In this project we developed OntoSoft, a framework for cataloguing of scientific software that follows best practices for open software sharing and reuse. OntoSoft is a federated catalog, so each scientific community can maintain its own repository but all repositories are interconnected. OntoSoft includes a distributed query system to enable users to find software across different OntoSoft repositories. OntoSoft allows crowdsourcing of software metadata by incorporating an access control system in OntoSoft so users can control who can edit the metadata about their software.
To improve awareness and train scientists to improve software dissemination, this project also resulted in the Geoscience Papers of the Future (GPF) Initiative. This initiative, initially developed by the 30+ members of OntoSoft’s Early Career Advisory Committee, produced training materials that were used in dozens of training sessions that involved hundreds of geoscientists. These sessions were held at conferences, universities, and government laboratories. The sessions teach scientists to write papers that incorporate best practices of open source data and software sharing, reproducible publications, and digital scholarship. We refer to these papers as Geoscience Papers of the Future. A Special Issue of the American Geophysical Union’s Earth and Space Science journal included a collection of such papers. The initiative had particularly strong uptake in the geospace sciences community, which studies the interactions between the Earth’s upper atmosphere with interplanetary space. A broader follow up of this initiative was the Scientific Paper of the Future initiative, with participation from neuroscience and more recently the artificial intelligence communities.
More details about the project can be found at https://www.ontosoft.org/.
Last Modified: 06/15/2020
Modified by: Yolanda Gil
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