This project aims to map the relationships between skills, services and technologies within the domain of Research Software Engineering (RSE).

This project

This project is driven by the growing need for Research Software Engineers (RSEs) to assist researchers, as research is becoming increasingly reliant on computational technologies. There is a growing emphasis on providing reusable code and reproducible data, which increasingly necessitates software engineering skills that are not possessed by most researchers.

By creating a semantic overview of the interactions between skills, technologies, and services in the RSE community, this ontology will provide a framework for recording the skills and technologies that individual RSEs have familiarity with, and the services that they are able to provide to researchers, to facilitate the assignment of skilled RSEs to projects where they will be able to provide appropriate software engineering and related assistance.

Future plans

This project was started with the main goal of assisting in solving management-related problems that RSE teams may be facing. This project also hopes to provide a concise semantic representation of the RSE community, which may have broader applicability in terms of identifying skills gaps and opportunities for skills exchanges. Lastly, we hope that this project will help to raise awareness of what RSEs do, and the value they bring to the research ecosystem.

About us

This project developed out of the Hons Informatics work of Megan Stock, Nina and Rhone Roux, and Ariana Subroyen at Stellenbosch University, under the supervision of Prof Arina Britz, in collaboration with RSE@SUN, and is continuing under the Open Life Science (OLS) training and mentoring programme.

Please submit questions and suggestions to the Team through the following webform.