JISC

Overview

Software plays a major role in producing, managing and analyzing data across sciences, humanities and beyond. The SWORD project seeks to develop a vocabulary that will help describe software used by the curation and data preservation community. The description of software is crucial in areas of digital preservation, service integration, text mining, service discovery for users and in describing the provenance of curated data in areas such as bioinformatics, other life sciences, the physical and social sciences and many more.

Aims and objectives

This project will produce a Software Ontology (SWO) that describes software commonly used to produce, analyse and serve data. A workflow describing the development process will also be documented.

Project methodology

We will develop the SWO by collecting descriptions from the community, both remotely and at two workshops, and through weekly “describe a software” conference calls in which we focus on one particular type of software and annotate that.  Engineering the SWO will be done using an agile development, rapid prototyping-rapid release methodology.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

We will release an ontology of software that describes at least 200 pieces of software.  SWORD will produce a knowledge blog about the SWO itself; the process of adding to SWO; a detailing of the workflow developed within SWORD; and case studies in how SWO is used.

Technology / Standards used

The SWO will be built in the Web Ontology Language, OWL (a W3C recommended language) and refined using the JISC-funded Protégé tool.