In general, I come away from this page thinking, "Where's the beef?" There's no software on the "Available Software" page! Shouldn't there be TONS of information here? Documentation, downloads, tips, guides, examples, etc? Stats on how much software is recorded here? I'd expect this to be THE central page of the Research Software Portal, and it's nearly a blank page.
- Comprehensive software search sounds great, but the page it takes me to isn't a search page, it's a filterable list. Starting with a long list of items feels overwhelming, and the columns I'm given aren't really what I was looking for. (They seem to be details about the software, but they're not the kinds of details that a researcher or someone supporting researchers would want to know.) Examples of what I think people DO want to know: software name, research field (discipline), research method, software type (application, library, utility?), delivery method (download, Webapp/SaaS, API/PaaS). What really confuses me is that there are only 59 items in the list. Is this really a comprehensive search tool? Is the data on software.xsede.org going to be different from what's on software-dev? Is this going to be a link to XUP? (In which case, it would only be comprehensive wrt XSEDE. Plus, linking to an external site for the info on available software seems deceptive.) In general, what's linked to now doesn't seem like a comprehensive software search, and I don't know what will replace it.
- "Discover software by enabled use case" sounds like it ought to be part of the comprehensive software search, not a separate function. Also, I doubt that someone looking for software honestly would find it useful to start with a list of our use cases. What might be more useful would be to search for software using other criteria, and then when he/she finds an interesting software package, ask which use cases we think it enables? So something more like, "Identify use cases enabled by software."
- The "Discuss available software" item takes me to a page with a handful of discussion forums, mostly empty. Not useful at all. What am I supposed to do here? Compare to https://portal.xsede.org/forums. IMO, it would be more useful to create an XSEDE community on Reddit.
- "Browse software announcements & news" - Why not just announcements or news? Aren't they the same thing? As in the Delivery Efforts page (see related thread), this should be a link to a *filtered* list of news items, not all of them.
Delivery Effort Stage:
I want to add to Liming's comment. Just today I was trying to look for software from certain domain (say, genomics). I would like to be able to look at a listing of software that are in this domain. Then I can narrow it down to more specific functionalities I am looking for, e.g. genome assembly, etc. So I back her up for her point 1 above.
Wirawan,
We have two ways to add software information to the Research Software Portal, 1) automatically ingest it from other catalogs, or 2) someone enters it by hand. We're still identifying sources to get software information from. Are you aware of any other catalogs we could get genome assembly software information from? Do you know of communities or teams that produce and support that software?
Besides not finding the specific software you're looking for, what are your thoughts on the software search functionality itself? Was it straigh forward or do you have ideas on how we could make it better?
Thanks for the feedback.
JP
Lee,
What do you think about the new software search here?
If you click on a component name it takes you to a software detail page. I think it might be interesting to have a software detail/home page that not only summarizes the information we have, but includes related news/announcements, pointers to discussion forums, and links to anything else we have about the component.
I think we should make the Life Cycle -> Available Software page go directly to the new software search.
What do you think?
JP