2018 ESIP Summer Meeting

Earth and environmental scientists and data managers write significant amounts of code each year for large scale data manipulation. However, publishing and sharing this code is not a common practice and is hampered by the lack of thematic code registries that are designed to make code easily discoverable and reusable. In an exploratory session at last year’s ESIP summer meeting we discussed community practices, existing repositories, challenges, and recommendations for what might be termed ‘information management’ code publication, i.e., code developed to prepare data for a specific research question.

This information management code registry has been implemented using OntoSoft (http://imcr.ontosoft.org/# ) and an initial hackathon conducted. It’s focus is on making code more discoverable that addresses common procedures that earth and environmental information managers encounter when organizing, cleaning, manipulating, documenting, and archiving data sets. It will live in the niche between scientific analysis code and short code snippets as found in Stack Overflow. It will be a community maintained resource containing everything from example information management code to programs with multiple functions that are generalized to be easily reused. In this session we aim to build a community and discuss best practices for publishing code, code metadata, and repository governance/maintenance. After a short introduction to the registry in OntoSoft and a report on lessons learned from the hackathon we will launch into discussion of best practices, governance and a wish-list of code priorities.

Agenda (bit.ly/imcragenda).

Session notes (bit.ly/imcrnotes).