Thoughts around minicm

[maelle]

Linked to #175 and following a conversation with @cboettig

It'd be good to split codemetar into minicm and codemetar.

• minicm would be aimed at creating a CodeMeta file from DESCRIPTION only. It'd probably depend only on desc and jsonlite. It could also be called litecm or so.

• codemetar would add the elements guessed from the development platform (we only do GitHub at this point, via git2r to guess the remote, and via gh), and from pkgbuild.

We could suggest to pkgdown authors to embed metadata in pkgdown website homepages, generated

• from CodeMeta.json if there's one
• by using minicm

To be sure one always use an up-to-date codemeta.json one could add codemetar::write_codemeta() in the deploy steps if using e.g. Travis to deploy the website.
The exact format of the metadata to be embedded in (pkgdown) websites is yet to be determined.

[maelle]

Why would having a minimal codemeta.json embedded in pkgdown websites help?

Same question for the case when a GitHub repo associated with a pkgdown website has a codemeta.

(yes @cboettig I am asking annoying questions 😉)

[cboettig]

Re embedding codemeta in pkgdown sites: this is really just to improve search engine hits. to be sure to work it should be done using a purely schema.org context, rather than codemeta context (which adds ~ 10 terms to the schema.org context).

Google reads these terms and will be more likely to turn up your software in searches this way (and one day might be able to show it in a pretty card, the way it does for stuff like when you google a restaurant or a recipe, see: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data).

For example, here's how google sees source code on GitHub: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/#url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fropensci%2Fcodemetar

Note that it includes the "@type": "SoftwareSourceCode" like in a codemeta document, because GitHub embeds this type definition in every GitHub repo webpage for precisely this reason.

[maelle]

Related to #268

[maelle]

Related to #292

And to @cboettig's work in https://github.com/cboettig/metar/

[maelle]

there is now the codemeta package