Toward Research Software Categories

TL;DR

This paper proposes a multi-dimensional framework for categorizing research software, focusing on role, developer, and maturity aspects, to improve understanding and systematic comparison of research software types.

Contribution

It introduces a novel categorization template and applies it to define and compare role-based, developer-based, and maturity-based research software categories.

Findings

A comprehensive template for research software categorization

Identification of key dimensions: role, developer, maturity

Facilitates systematic comparison of research software types

Abstract

Research software has been categorized in different contexts to serve different goals. We start with a look at what research software is, before we discuss the purpose of research software categories. We propose a multi-dimensional categorization of research software. We present a template for characterizing such categories. As selected dimensions, we present our proposed role-based, developer-based, and maturity-based categories. Since our work has been inspired by various previous efforts to categorize research software, we discuss them as related works. We characterize all these categories via the previously introduced template, to enable a systematic comparison.