SMECS: A Software Metadata Extraction and Curation Software

TL;DR

SMECS is a software tool that automates the extraction and curation of research software metadata from online sources, improving the process of making software FAIR-compliant through a user-friendly interface.

Contribution

The paper introduces SMECS, a novel tool that combines automated metadata extraction with interactive curation to facilitate FAIRification of research software.

Findings

SMECS effectively extracts metadata from GitHub repositories.

Usability experiments show SMECS provides a satisfactory user experience.

SMECS simplifies the process of creating high-quality research software metadata.

Abstract

Metadata play a crucial role in adopting the FAIR principles for research software and enables findability and reusability. However, creating high-quality metadata can be resource-intensive for researchers and research software engineers. To address this challenge, we developed the Software Metadata Extraction and Curation Software (SMECS) which integrates the extraction of metadata from existing sources together with a user-friendly interface for metadata curation. SMECS extracts metadata from online repositories such as GitHub and presents it to researchers through an interactive interface for further curation and export as a CodeMeta file. The usability of SMECS was evaluated through usability experiments which confirmed that SMECS provides a satisfactory user experience. SMECS supports the FAIRification of research software by simplifying metadata creation.