Metadata Traceability Extension

[Nepomuceno]

Issue: #287

View the rendered markdown here - https://github.com/Nepomuceno/SigMF/blob/traceability_extension/extensions/traceability.sigmf-ext.md

Introducing a metadata traceability extension to SigMF for maintaining an audit trail of modifications to the .sigmf-meta file. The "traceability" extension extends the existing "global" and "annotations" sections of SigMF. It allows users to include traceability information such as author details, timestamps of last modifications, revision numbers, and origin information related to where the original recording was stored.

I kindly request the SigMF community consider this proposal and evaluate the potential benefits it can bring to the ecosystem. Hopefully we can collaborate iteratively on this.

Thank you for your consideration.

closes #287

[777arc]

Could simplify it a bit by getting rid of the LastModified object and just having last_modified_author and last_modified_datetime in the root level

also shouldn't "revision" be a string so folks can do 0.0.1 and such? or is the plan to start at 0 and increment by 1

[Nepomuceno]

Could simplify it a bit by getting rid of the LastModified object and just having last_modified_author and last_modified_datetime in the root level

also shouldn't "revision" be a string so folks can do 0.0.1 and such? or is the plan to start at 0 and increment by 1

I think we could rename the LastModified object to be a ChangeTrack object that way it can be used to things like last modified but also for things like created and other like that keeping this as one object makes easier to implement this and to validate especially if it is going to be used in multiple places.

I think the plan for the revision it is to be incremental and ordered so starting from 0 and any new change would add 1 to that index

[jacobagilbert]

@Nepomuceno thanks for submitting this. This concept has actually come up before and I think there would be a lot of value in providing a canonical method of tracking this. I'm going to solicit a few other sources of input before I do a review.

[jacobagilbert]

@Nepomuceno can you remove the item we flagged above, or advocate for its retention as an optional field so we can get this feature merged?

[777arc]

I chatted with him and we're going to remove it from this extension