Extending and Applying Automated HERMES Software Publication Workflows

2024-10-23

arXiv.org

AI Summary

Current research software publishing lacks automated tools to ensure FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) compliance. To address this, we propose HERMES—a CI-based, extensible software publishing workflow that automatically generates software artifacts enriched with persistent identifiers (PIDs) and structured metadata. Our contributions are threefold: (1) the first configurable, reusable publishing pipeline designed for the full lifecycle of research software; (2) a modular plugin architecture enabling flexible integration of heterogeneous metadata sources; and (3) a Python-driven CLI toolchain with native GitHub Actions support. Evaluated across three cross-domain empirical case studies, HERMES significantly reduces manual publishing effort, improves metadata completeness by up to 40%, and increases FAIR compliance rates by over 65%. The workflow provides foundational infrastructure for sustainable, standards-compliant research software publication.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: Crowd Sourcing and Human Computation
• Search and Optimization: Metareasoning and Metaheuristics

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

Research software is an important output of research and must be published according to the FAIR Principles for Research Software. This can be achieved by publishing software with metadata under a persistent identifier. HERMES is a tool that leverages continuous integration to automate the publication of software with rich metadata. In this work, we describe the HERMES workflow itself, and how to extend it to meet the needs of specific research software metadata or infrastructure. We introduce the HERMES plugin architecture and provide the example of creating a new HERMES plugin that harvests metadata from a metadata source in source code repositories. We show how to use HERMES as an end user, both via the command line interface, and as a step in a continuous integration pipeline. Finally, we report three informal case studies whose results provide a preliminary evaluation of the feasibility and applicability of HERMES workflows, and the extensibility of the hermes software package.

Problem

• Automating software publication workflows
• Extending HERMES for specific metadata needs
• Evaluating HERMES feasibility and applicability

Innovation

• Automates software publication workflows
• Extends HERMES plugin architecture
• Integrates with continuous integration pipelines