Add labels to BioContainers made from Bioconda packages

[RenskeW]

Hello,

@mr-c and I are working on including software metadata in Workflow Run RO-Crate provenance. While registries such as bio.tools provide metadata, they are often not specific for a version. Therefore, it would be very useful if metadata could be directly retrieved from the container itself, using labels (following a common scheme).

Current status

BioContainers built from Dockerfiles have non-standard labels:

• base_image
• version (Dockerfile version)
• software
• software.version
• about.summary
• about.home
• about.documentation
• about.license_file
• about.license
• extra.identifiers.biotools
• about.tags

BioContainers made from Bioconda packages are unlabeled.

Proposal

• Add labels to BioContainers made from Bioconda packages.
• Annotations should follow the Open Container Initiative (OCI) format.
• Bio.tools identifiers could be represented by the namespaced key org.identifiers.biotools. This key can be adapted to represent other software identifiers (e.g. org.identifiers.rrid).

[osallou]

• regarding bioconda packages, don't know how/if they can add easilly some labels @bgruening ?
• modifying annotations is not transparent, beside updating existing containers definitions (and would not be reflected in containers themselves for existing ones). CI tools analyse them, so need to update CI tools in the same time.
• regarding identifier, why not (but again will not be reflected in existing containers)