Software libraries
There is a lot of duplication of effort by different organizations. It makes sense to have many organizations focused on different aspects of scientific problems, but often they are building software with many internal commonalities. Shared libraries can help reduce this and get the community more integrated.
Small
- A helpful unit of work can actually be very small
- Once a community need is identified, software can be designed to cover multiple use cases and attract a broad set of stakeholders
- These projects can be maintained by students and are easily achievable
- Can be valuable for getting jobs
- Can attract contributions from developers interested in geoscience
DigitalCrust will provide a forum to coordinate efforts on software libraries of interest to multiple stakeholders. We will also seek to support contributions by students. Specific domains will be prioritized for shared work:
- Data-describing schemas to promote interoperability
- Web-based plots (e.g., d3) that ingest data aligned with these schemas