Evaluate the use of CodeMeta instead of creating aboutcode-data

[sschuberth]

Maybe it makes sense to consider using the existing CodeMeta standard instead of coming up with aboutcode-data. If CodeMeta turns out to not suit our needs, maybe we still could borrow some ideas.

@pombredanne, what do you think?

[pombredanne]

@sschuberth I think CodeMeta has some interesting bits (in particular the research they did on existing metadata for software) and well defined goals: Minimal metadata schemas for science software and code. This shows up in the schema: embargoDate, funding, referencePublication seem clearly geared towards scientific stuff.

In contrast the goals here are to provide a common way to document and exchange data about software code between any AboutCode tools. So borrowing ideas from CodeMeta would be great. Providing some ways to convert to and from for the things that can be mapped together would be great too.

Beside this, I think it does not make sense to model the AboutCode data after an external data exchange format. Take SPDX: even though ScanCode supports SPDX (big thanks to you!), it does not use the SPDX data model internally. It only needs to be able to convert to and from as needed.

[sschuberth]

Sounds fair enough! I just wanted to have this documented somewhere publicly. I'd be fine with closing this then, unless you want to keep it around to remind us about possibly borrowing some ideas.