Until this week, a search in ADS for doctype:”software” keyword:”NASA” returned zero results. NASA has funded the ASCL to make its astronomy research software discoverable in ASCL and ADS. This required changes to the ASCL structure and the ADS data feed, and edits to some current records; it also entails mining various NASA software sites for codes that meet the ASCL’s criteria and creating appropriately tagged entries for them. In the first phase of the project, started in July, our wonderful developer Judy Schmidt (@SpaceGeck) worked her magic on our infrastructure, keywords have been added to some existing records, and ADS has ingested the first entries we’ve tagged with the NASA keyword. We can now see first results from this two-year project:

Additional changes will be coming to the ASCL in the coming months as we continue this funded work. We love this project; at its core, it’s a simple concept, and leverages existing resources (ADS, various NASA code sites, and ASCL) to make research software more discoverable and provides information about NASA software that was not readily available before. It furthers the excellent work NASA has been doing to release software, demonstrates yet another value of ADS (which has many superpowers!), and makes the ASCL more useful, too.

Most ASCL code entries have one or more links to articles that either describe or use the software in that entry. ADS ingests this information to associate the code with relevant literature. For example, the entry for 2LPTIC: 2nd-order Lagrangian Perturbation Theory Initial Conditions includes a link for an MNRAS paper in the Appears in field:

Going to the ADS entry for this software shows that the code is associated with a paper under Associated Articles:This, however, doesn’t tell you anything about the relationship between the article and the software. ADS and the ASCL have been working to improve this. The ASCL has been disambiguating these article links into Described in and Used in. At the ADS Hack Day event last month, ASCL provided ADS with disambiguated links for over 900 entries, and Carolyn Grant had these uploaded into ADS in a matter of minutes. (ADS folks are wizards, I tell you! Wizards! They work magic!!)

Currently, ASCL records appear the same, but for those records we have provided disambiguated article links, ADS displayed them as Described in and Used in, as you can see in the 2-DUST: Dust radiative transfer code entry, for which the ASCL lists two papers:

For ASCL records in which the Appears in link(s) have not been disambiguated, there is no change in how they are displayed in ADS. We have over 700 entries with article links still to be disambiguated and we continue this work; ADS will be ingesting the changes with their regular weekly ingest of ASCL data.