  Research software has been categorized in different contexts to serve
different goals. We start with a look at what research software is, before we
discuss the purpose of research software categories. We propose a
multi-dimensional categorization of research software. We present a template
for characterizing such categories. As selected dimensions, we present our
proposed role-based, developer-based, and maturity-based categories. Since our
work has been inspired by various previous efforts to categorize research
software, we discuss them as related works. We characterize all these
categories via the previously introduced template, to enable a systematic
comparison.
