Storing and sharing research data with MathRepo

MathRepo offers mathematicians a central infrastructure to store and publicly share supplementary material for their paper publications. In Computeralgebra Rundbrief, Claudia Fevola and Christiane Görgen published an article on the recent developments of the repository and its role within the research data initiative MaRDI.

MathRepo was established in 2017 by our Nonlinear Algebra group as an online repository for all kinds of research data in their field. Access to and from the broader mathematical community, however, was always possible. The authors Claudia Fevola and Christiane Görgen are both also maintainers of the repository. They describe the currently stored data as "a collection of the recorded factual material commonly accepted as necessary to validate research findings" and the actual content as anything "from mathematical documents, notebooks, research-softwarepackages and libraries, computer algebra systems, algorithms, to collections of mathematical objects."

MathRepo these days predominantly contains computer-algebra research data of three main types: computations performed for publications, additional lists of examples to theoretical results, and presentations of problems solved in workshops or lectures. It fills a gap in existing storage solutions by providing a centralized infrastructure that can both store and visually present a wide range of different data. This is interesting for instance for smaller contributions to papers like computational proofs in a particular programming language or lists of examples of objects with properties of interest.

In their article, Claudia Fevola and Christiane Görgen, who is also the Mathematical Data Consultant of MaRDI, describe the status quo of the project and their visions for the future. The launch of the Mathematical Research Data initiative MaRDI increased awareness of the importance of FAIR principles for sustainable research. It led to a discussion on how these principles of “Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable” research data can be implemented in MathRepo. The repository will be further expanded and improved, particularly regarding these aspects. Currently, the maintainers address the main issues of trustworthiness of the repository, barriers to reusability, and forward compatibility of the standards for integration into the MaRDI infrastructure.