prior-art.md

Prior Art

Metadata Files

OSSMETADATA

Developed and used by Netflix to initially power their internal project dashboards.

Example: https://github.com/Netflix/edda/blob/master/OSSMETADATA

.google/packaging.yaml

Developed and used by Google to document and package sample projects. One primary use of this data is to power the sample project directory inside of Android Studio.

Example: https://github.com/googlesamples/android-StorageProvider/blob/master/.google/packaging.yaml

about_yaml

Developed at 18F initially for their own projects. Documented as powering the 18F Dashboard (though no longer appears to be active).

Docs: http://www.rubydoc.info/gems/about_yml/0.0.10
Example: https://github.com/18F/about_yml/blob/master/.about.yml

.ABOUT files, ABC Data

​ Simple convention with metadata YAML files stored side-by-side with code they document.(Note: these predate the 18F about_yaml) ​ Used by AboutCode.org, libraries.io and other: Docs: https://github.com/nexB/aboutcode/tree/master/aboutcode-data Example:

• https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/tree/develop/thirdparty/prod
• https://libraries.io/npm/jquery/3.2.1.about
• https://github.com/triplecheck/components/tree/master/samples

Schemas

Various schemas have been developed to describe software projects:

• https://schema.org/SoftwareApplication
• https://github.com/CodeMeta/codemeta
• https://github.com/ewilderj/doap

README Badges

One common ad hoc way of expressing some of this metadata is through badges embedded in README files. These badges have the advantage of being very visibile, and therefore more likely to stay up to date. However, they are not as easily machine parseable for use in other applications. A few of these projects that document types of metadata we may be interested in:

• https://github.com/orangemug/stability-badges
• https://github.com/insin/caveat-utilitor
• https://github.com/danielbachhuber/statemarks