Software Stories for landmark legacy code

Morane Gruenpeter (1) , Roberto Di Cosmo (1, 2) , Katherine Thornton (3) , Kenneth Seals-Nutt (3) , Carlo Montangero (4) , Guido Scatena (4)

1 Software Heritage
2 DGD-I - Direction générale déléguée à l'innovation
3 sciencestories.io
4 University of Pisa - Università di Pisa

Software Heritage in collaboration with the sciencestories.io team and the University of Pisa are introducing a new way to showcase software, that can be accessible to a wide range of software enthusiasts without any technical background, Software Stories. The project is supported by UNESCO as part of the shared mission to collect, preserve and share source code as precious asset of humankind [1]. The Software Stories interface is designed to highlight materials about a software title in a visual manner, similar to a digital software museum. The engine provides a semi-automatic tool for curators to create the presentation layer of the Software Heritage Acquisition Process (SWHAP) [2] allowing curators to generate a multimedia overview of a landmark legacy software title. For the prototype, the University of Pisa has provided three software titles that were curated in 2019 during the creation of the SWHAP. These software titles were collected and curated in GitHub and then archived in Software Heritage. For the presentation layer the collected materials and metadata were deposited in Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. You can visit https://stories.softwareheritage.org to check the Pisa collection and watch the demonstration video online on https://youtu.be/s6uVdRDh5Xk. [1] Expert Group Report. Paris call: Software source code as heriitage for sustainable development. Available from https://unesdoc.un- esco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000366715, 2019. [2] Laura Bussi, Roberto Di Cosmo, Carlo Montangero, and Guido Scatena. The software heritage acquisition process. Technical Report CI-2019/WS/8, UNESCO, Università di Pisa, Inria, 2019. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000371017

Mots clés: software preservation; legacy software; source code; acquisition process Conference Topics -new developments; Showcase software; metadata; Wikimedia commons; Wikidata

Domaines: Bibliothèque électronique [cs.DL]; Sciences de l'information et de la communication; Histoire, Philosophie et Sociologie des sciences

Morane Gruenpeter, Roberto Di Cosmo, Katherine Thornton, Kenneth Seals-Nutt, Carlo Montangero, et al.. Software Stories for landmark legacy code. [Research Report] Inria. 2021. ⟨hal-03483982⟩