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The publiccode.yml standard

GitHub release Join the #publiccode channel Get invited Docs Italia Documentation

A metadata description standard for public software.

Table of Contents

Description

A metadata description standard for public software and policy repositories that is easy to use both for developers and people with less technical background, in order to make the software developed by Public Administrations and Public Organisations easily discoverable.

What this file is for

Many great software projects are developed by public administrations, however reuse of these projects is very limited. Some of the reasons for low uptake of such projects is a lack of discoverability and that it is hard to find out what project can actually work in the context of a different public administration.

The publiccode.yml file is meant to solve all those problems. As such, it is an easily readable file for civil servants that are trying to figure out whether a project will work for them, and easily readable for computers as well. It contains information such as:

  • the title and description of the project or product in English and/or other languages;
  • the development status, e.g. concept, development, beta, stable, obsolete;
  • which organisation developed the project;
  • who is caring for the maintenance and when this expires;
  • who to contact for technical or support inquiries;
  • what national and local legal frameworks this project or product is designed for;
  • what software dependencies this project or product has.

The publiccode.yml file format should both be able to easily be added to any new project, as well as grow with the project as it expands beyond the original context it was developed in.

Documentation

This repository is structured in order to be compatible with the Docs Italia platform. As such, the content in the relevant folders will be compiled and rendered inside that platform. The Docs Italia platform is able to handle different releases and localised versions of the same file drawing from the document's GitHub repository. As such, the platform is to be considered the default landing page for the project.

Finding projects

Finding projects depends on how the search API is structured for every hosting platform. For example, you can find all publiccode.yml on GitHub files by searching using the frontend or the API.

The Italian Digital Transformation Team is also working on providing a scanner which looks for all publiccode files on all publicly accessible websites, and exposing them as open data.

Versioning

Latest release: GitHub release See all versions

This project follows the Semantic Versioning. For more information see SemVer.org.

Furthermore, the project uses branches and tags in the following way:

  • The master branch contains the latest stable version of the standard.
  • The development branch contains the improvements proposed for the next version.
  • GitHub's release page contains all the released versions of the standard. Releases are done following the tag version for consistency.

However, since the repository contains both the core schema and the country-specific ones, it is necessary to further refine the versioning. As such, each update at the core and/or to a country-specific extension will be tagged as follows:

core-x.y.z;cc-a.b.c

where cc is the country code defined in the countryExtensionVersion key.

This versioning schema is fundamental in this project since the publiccode.yml file contains references to the core release in the publiccodeYmlVersion key and each country-specific schema contains a version key.

Examples of this versioning schema may be:

  • core:0.2;it:0.4
  • core:0.2;fr:1.1

Contributing

Feel free to submit Pull Requests and to file Issues.

Authors

The publiccode.yml specification is developed by the Italian Digital Transformation Team and the Authors.

Licence

Licenced under the CC-0.