Mapping ISO metadata standards to codemeta

Abstract

The codemeta project recently proposed a vocabulary for software metadata. ISO Technical Committee 211 has published a set of metadata standards for geographic data and many kinds of related resources, including software. In order for ISO metadata creators and users to take advantage of the codemeta recommendations, a mapping from ISO elements to the codemeta vocabulary must exist. This mapping is complicated by differences in the approaches used by ISO and codemeta, primarily a difference between hard and soft typing of metadata elements. These differences are described in detail and a mapping is proposed that includes sixty-four of the sixty-eight codemeta V2 terms. The codemeta terms have also been mapped to dialects used by twenty-one software repositories, registries and archives. The average number of terms mapped in these cases is 11.2. The disparity between these numbers reflects the fact that many of the dialects that have been mapped to codemeta are focused on citation or dependency identification and management while ISO and codemeta share additional targets that include access, use, and understanding. Addressing this broader set of use cases requires more metadata elements.