Scope

The RSMD guidelines provide a standardized community based requirements and recommendations to end users in the following areas:

  • General metadata requirements
  • Accessibility and preservation (A = Archive)
  • Reference and identification (R = Reference)
  • Description and classification (D = Describe)
  • Credit and attribution (C = Cite)
  • Reuse, licensing and legal aspects
  • Re-executability: dependencies and execution environment

While the guidelines cover a broad range of aspects, they primarily focus on metadata collection, management, and curation, and do not address software engineering practices such as software quality, testing, performance optimization, or collaboration.

Out of scope

The following elements are considered out of scope for this document:

  1. Skills: While important, the discussion of end-users skills and training falls beyond the scope of this document.
  2. Homogeneity between disciplines and user profiles: Addressing the heterogeneity of disciplines and user profiles is beyond the scope of this document.
  3. Documentation: Although essential for comprehensive software, the specific guidance and best practices on documenting code fall outside the perimeter of this document.

The recommendations

The RSMD guidelines are organized into seven distinct aspects, each with a clear high-level objective and a set of actionable and detailed recommendations. Each recommendation is uniquely identified using the semantic identifier RSMD-X.Y, where X represents the aspect number and Y represents the recommendation number. Priorities are assigned to each recommendation, categorized into three levels: essential (highest priority), important, and useful (lowest priority). This prioritization helps to emphasize the critical recommendations and ensure that the guidelines address key areas effectively.