Hello, Because of ever-more complicated workflows in computational biology, researchers combine more and more tools within a project and people start getting confused over what (flavour of) tool has been involved in an analysis when exchanging worklows or when skimming through notes of an analysis done a few years back. To help this situation, the old concept of software catalogs and assigning IDs to software has gained some new attention.
We have come up with an extension to the debian/upstream/metadata file like Registry: - Name: NameOfCatalog Entry: SoftwareIdentifier and at the moment support SciCrunch RRIDs, OMICtools and bio.tools. These IDs are earmarked to eventually appear on the Debian Med task pages and point to the external source, which in part already point to Debian (like OMICtools) and add additional information helping our users like informing on similar tools or about tools co-cited in scientific publications. This is meant to help our users to craft better workflows more quickly. And it helps our visibility, too. Also for less scientific software it may be of interest, e.g. for our package trackers, to point to catalogs. I just now found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Hub and find to like it. There may be others. What does our community think? There is https://www.openhub.net/p/inkscape and one could add Registry: - Name: Open Hub Entry: inkscape to debian/upstream/metadata to give whoever is interested the opportunity to add a pointer to or from that catalog when talking about that software. I would not place the full URL since those paths are not unlikely to change over time. The immediate concern is obviously yet another overhead that we impose on our developers. But once we have everything in the successor of alioth, I see this to be a very inviting first contribution by our next generation of developers or just some motivated users of ours. So, the overhead should not be too bad for us. Please discuss. Many thanks Steffen
