OKG-Soft: An Open Knowledge Graph with Machine Readable Scientific Software Metadata

Scientific software is crucial for understanding, reusing and reproducing results in computational sciences. Software is often stored in code repositories, which may contain human readable instructions necessary to use it and set it up. However, a significant amount of time is usually required to understand how to invoke a software component, prepare data in the format it requires, and use it in combination with other software. In this paper we introduce OKG-Soft, an open knowledge graph that describes scientific software in a machine readable manner. OKG-Soft includes: 1) an ontology designed to describe software and the specific data formats it uses; 2) an approach to publish software metadata as an open knowledge graph, linked to other Web of Data objects; and 3) a framework to annotate, query, explore and curate scientific software metadata. OKG-Soft supports the FAIR principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reuse for software. We demonstrate the benefits of OKG-Soft with two applications: a browser for understanding scientific models in the environmental and social sciences, and a portal to combine climate, hydrology, agriculture, and economic software models.