1. Introduction

What Is the Software Catalogue (SC)?

SC is a platform that provides comprehensive project visibility and supports compliance within GEANT-related software development projects.

Benefits of Using SC

• Rich metadata in regards to software project
• Programming languages, libraries, frameworks
• Full community discovery - not only programmers
• Roles and activity of community members
• Statistics
• Visualizations
• A shareable business card
• Overview for whole project - all information in one place

How Much Effort Is Required?

📌 99% of information is gathered automatically!

You Only Need to Provide 1%

• Project name
• Short description
• URLs to relevant to data sources

These are quick and minimal inputs required from the user.

2. How to

How do I add my project?

Required information

To add your project to SC:

1. Provide the full project name

2. Add the short name (ID)

You can also select the development status, but by default it is set to Active.

Optional information

If you want to take full advantage of SC, you need to enter more data such as:

• Task - Select the related GEANT task your project contributes to
• Description - Confirm or edit the project description
• License - Choose the correct license
• Resources - Add resource links (e.g. source code repositories)

📌 Resources are especially crucial, as they enable SC to automatically collect technical and community data about your project preparing more precise picture of it.

On the video you can see the process of filling the optional data.

• Selecting the task related to Geant on which the project is prepared
• Description is already filled
• Selecting the license
• Adding resources. If you do not know where to find a link to the source code repository, you can check it on the SC Frequently Asked Questions page and add it. In this case the user want to add repo from Bitbucket hosting platform and after checking the way did it.

Providing additional information.

As we "only" collect 99% of the information automatically, there are few things that should be edited manually. These are primarily related to information that SC cannot retrieve from the sources, such as the description, main contact, or categories.

The example in the video shows filling of missing Categories data and the effect of this action:

How to improve my project?

Don't worry, our tool will let you know if the information is incomplete. As you can see in the image below, you have access to a log that will show you what you should consider adding. This notification appears in the project log available in the Summary section of the project page. If you click See Project Log button, you will see detailed warnings about incomplete data. Additionally, you can find there information about discovery progress and any errors that have occurred.

3. Overview of basic features

Project Page

Main Project Page

The result of adding a project to SC is a project profile with lots of metadata. It presents all the collected information in one place in the form of charts, visualization, statistics and list of information.

It is a kind of business card of the project, collecting all information in one place.

Resources

Project is not just raw source code stored on a hosting platform and versioned by git. The project is composed of multiple digital parts. It consists of a management system like Jira, quality assurance and analytics platforms like SonarQube or Mend, and many other constantly growing sites.

📌 SC is a way to have all digital parts of the project in one place, Not just the code itself!

It can contain a variety of resources, collect data from them, and present it clearly to show the big picture of the project and serve as a source of truth.

The video below shows how to add resources to a project page. To do this, click the plus button under the Resources section, select a category (i.e. the platform hosting the resource) and enter the relevant link.

Licences

Another key function is licensing. As we know, defining licences is very important to comply with current laws and regulations. However, this is not easy for multi-repository projects.

SC helps in this effort to have a commonly known licence. It allows you to define the licence for the whole project in one place. It also catalogs all the licences for projects maintained under the GEANT organisation.

Public Profile of the Project

It is the public representation of the project that does not require authorization and is available at a separate URL. It contains limited information that can be shown outside the organization.

To create the Public Profile of the Project, you need to change the visibility of the project from internal to public. Then you can copy the link and share it with people outside the GEANT organization.

Person Page

Catalogue of contributors

The Software Catalogue is not only a catalogue of software, but also a search engine for people. It offers many different methods of filtering, including by technical skills such as technology or programming language.

Personal Profile

Each person has their own profile with a huge amount of metadata. It presents not only basic user data like email or organization membership but also automatically collected information about projects, technology stack, source code contribution divided by language and project while outlying total days of activity.

4. How can I get Help?

Finally, in case of any issues with the Software Catalogue, there are several support options available.

1. Contextual help menu & user tutorial - We try to adequately describe almost all of our features in SC to help the user and minimize misunderstandings of provided functionalities. The message is displayed by hovering over the icon (tooltip), which is usually a question mark. There is also a user tutorial which can be accessed by clicking on the help button located in the top right of the home page.
2. Contact us via Slack channel or email available on the welcome page.
3. Chatbot assistant on welcome page - It is a tool entirely developed by our team which use the latest AI solutions like Large Language Models (LLMs).