Shaowen Wang (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) • November 27, 2018
(reposted from GSI blog)
Numerous fields are increasingly dependent on geospatial software that is defined to transform geospatial data (i.e. data with geo and/or spatial references) into geospatial information, knowledge, and intelligence. The growing benefits and importance of geospatial software to science and engineering is driven by tremendous needs in these fields such as agriculture, ecology, emergency management, environmental engineering and sciences, geography and spatial sciences, geosciences, national security, public health, and social sciences, to name just a few, and is reflected by a massive digital geospatial industry. Critical and urgent efforts are also needed to prepare the next-generation workforce for computation- and/or data-intensive geospatial research and education, technological innovation, and real-world problem solving and decision making.
Survey on sustainable research software ending soon
Karthik Ram • October 22, 2018
A major part of our year long effort to plan a US research software institute is to understand the diverse challenges and barriers that researchers face when using or developing research software. To better understand these challenges, we are currently in the midst of running a large scale survey aimed at researchers who develop or use software in academia, government, and other research focused institutes. If you’re involved in any aspect of research software or know colleagues who are, please take and share the survey:
Fundamentals of Software Sustainability
Daniel S. Katz (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) • October 22, 2018
(reposted from Daniel S. Katz’s blog
This blog post is intended as companion text for a talk I gave at the September 2018 NumFOCUS Project Forum in in New York, though I also hope it stands on its own.
To address software sustainability, it is important first to understand how the term sustainability is used more generally. It’s most often used in the context of ecology, often specifically in the relationship between humans and the planet. An example of this is from Karl-Henrik Robèrt, who has said (paraphrased and via Wikipedia) that while natural processes are cyclical, we (humans) process resources linearly. We consume resources, and convert them in part into waste. This waste doesn’t find its way back into natural cycles; it’s not reused or reassimilated. Robèrt called for life-styles and forms of societal organization based on cyclic processes compatible with the Earth’s natural cycles. I think the key element of this is that sustainability means using cyclic processes that do not use up resources.
CiteAs.org: Discovering and Improving software requests for citation
James Howison (University of Texas at Austin), Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem (Impact Story) • October 1, 2018
CiteAs.org links between pieces of software and their requested citations. It enables moving from the name of a piece of software, its webpage URL, or a DOI, directly to the machine-readable metadata (e.g., BibTex, Zotero auto-import) for the citation the author of the software package wants you to use. CiteAs.org is funded by the Digital Science program at the Sloan Foundation (Grant Number 8028), and conceived and developed by Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem at ImpactStory, together with James Howison from the Information School at the University of Texas at Austin.
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