Abstract

Introduction: The FAIR principles stand for four important features that research objects such as software, methods and data should follow in order to allow other researchers replicate the analysis and the results. The four components of these principles are the findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability, and most the software available and associated to publications are findable by versioning systems such as github, but often they do not meet the other criteria, either because there are missing data, lack of documentation about the usage or testable examples to guarantee the appropriate execution. Regarding the usability, the metadata describing the objects allow the correct categorization of the research objects and proper recommendation of its application. But the metadata generation using semantic standards requires some knowledge of controlled vocabularies to describe them correctly, allowing an exclusive portion of the community to fully meet the FAIR principles. Results: We implemented the FAIRLibJS that provides means to annotate Javascript software libraries allowing serverless web applications achieve the fourth FAIR criteria through correct metadata generation following semantic metadata standards. Besides the software metadata generation, the tool also enables the search and automatic semantic description of scientific publications indexed in OpenAire. The third main functionality is the extraction of keywords for any web application software and, for those directed to the biological domain, it also provides a mapping with the EDAM ontology topic and operation concepts. The JavaScript library and the Web module with usage examples and functionality demonstrations is provided to the public domain with open source. Conclusion: The FAIRLibJS was able to extract correct keywords, from a given tool summary, for the manually annotated workflows in workflowHub, and also chose correctly the topics and operations concepts for more than 90% of the workflows. We also showed that through the usage of a few extra commentary syntax for documentation strings, the software developers are able to use our tool to derive enriched metadata to describe the Javascript modules, their functions with inputs and returned outputs and the module dependencies. The tool also provides a friendly interface to search data in OpenAire platform, enabling the automatic annotation of scientific publications.