Asset Description Metadata Schema for Software

Owner

European Union

Supra-national authority

Contact information

European Commission (DG Informatics) - ISA² Programme – SEMIC Action

IMPORTANT NOTICE

This data specification has been deprecated. It has been replaced by the Asset Description Metadata Schema solution.

ADMS.SW is a metadata vocabulary to describe software making it possible to more easily explore, find, and link software on the Web. The specification reuses existing specifications, such as DOAP, SPDX, ISO 19770-2, ADMS, and the Trove software map.

By using ADMS.SW to describe software in software forges, repositories, and catalogues, publishers increase discoverability and enable applications easily to consume software metadata. It allows software publishers to

provide unique identifiers to software projects, software releases, and software packages through HTTP URIs and ISO 19770-2 identifying systems;
keep their own system for documenting and storing software;
improve indexing and visibility of software;
describe software in a common way so that it can be seamlessly cross-queried and discovered through a single access point (e.g. Joinup);
retrieve, compare and potentially link software to one another; and
identify software to be reused avoiding duplication and expensive development work.

Motivation

If Europe wants to realise its objectives of a Digital Single Market enabled through e-Government, it will need to develop a large number of software solutions for e-Government that must be interoperable across the borders of Member States and Sectors. In this context, Public administrations in Europe will increasingly need to coordinate the development of software solutions for e-Government and share and reuse these software solutions as free and open-source software (F/OSS). In recent years, many European countries and regions have constructed national and regional on-line platforms (software forges). Likewise, the European Commission is promoting the cross-border sharing and reuse of software via its new platform, Joinup, and has developed the vision to give better visibility to this software through the use of common descriptions, enabling the "federation" of software description metadata. This federation of software descriptions was first set up on the OSOR.EU platform and is continued on the Joinup platform. Emerging Semantic Web standards entail a major opportunity to further enhance and give more visibility to software descriptions on the Web. Better visibility will trigger the reuse of free and open-source software, which in turn will contribute to the interoperability of electronic public services provided by e-Government systems.

Milestones

In January 2012 the Working Group was created;
On 2 May 2012 version 0.3 entered a month-long public review period, ending on 2 June 2012.
After the Working Group meeting of 2012.06.05 the name of the specification changed from ADMS.F/OSS to ADMS.SW. This implies the scope of the specification is not only to describe metadata of Free and Open Source Software Assets, but also other, non-F/OSS, Software Assets.
On June 29 version v1.00 was released.
In August 2012 a spreadsheet template was released to generate ADMS.SW descriptions using Google Refine RDF extension;
In November 2012 the software taxonomies listed in the ADMS.SW specification were described using SKOS and provided with multi-lingual labels (English, French, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, ...);
In November 2012, an ADMS.SW Validator service was released.

Future plans

We foresee the following future activities:

Provide an mapping and extraction mechanism to retrieve description metadata from ISO 19770-2-compliant software tags
Support the implementation of an ADMS.SW export API plugin for FusionForge FusionForge and/or Allura by December 2012
Support the implementation of AMDS.SW by at least 4 public sector software catalogues and forges by May 2013
Implementation of ADMS.SW import, edit, and export features on Joinup v1.5 to federate software descriptions by June 2013

Known implementations

Google Refine RDF template for ADMS.SW

Owner: European Union

Date: June 2012

ADMS.SW plugin for FusionForge

Owner: Olivier Berger - Institut Mines - Telecom

Date: August 2012

ADMS.SW export for the Debian Package Tracking System

Owner: Olivier Berger - Institut Mines - Telecom

Date: August 2012

ADMS.SW plugin for Tuleap

Date: October 2012

Related news

2012-11-05 - Just released: ADMS.SW Validator to verify and visualise RDF software metadata
2012-08-30 - ADMS.SW used to introduce Semantic Web descriptions in the Debian Package Tracking System
2012-08-01 - News from Basque Country: Openness and Reuse of Applications Decree already approved
2012-07-04 - Cataloguing open source software preferred to running development forge
2012-06-21 - Exporting software description metadata from FusionForge
2012-06-14 - ADMS.SW v0.4 released today
2012-05-30 - ISA Contributor Agreement v 1.1 published and used on Joinup
2012-05-28 - Only one week left to participate in the public review of ADMS.F/OSS
2012-05-25 - Spain's Basque Country's administration to share all its software
2012-05-16 - RADion v1.00 officially released
2012-05-10 - Un vocabulaire pour les méta-données décrivant les logiciels paru pour appel à commentaires
2012-05-08 - 69 percent of software metadata vocabulary covered by existing work
2012-05-02 - Vocabulary for software metadata released for public review
2012-02-29 - Kroes replies to Munich: 'Standards in IT procurement will tackle the problem'
2012-02-10 - Group works on standard to automatically find open source software
2012-01-25 - 'Public administrations should join open source associations'
2012-01-18 - Welcome to the MPLv2!
2012-01-18 - EU - Establishment of the ADMS.F/OSS Working Group
2012-01-05 - EU - Survey: helping public authorities procure ICT based on standards
2011-12-11 - Do you use or contribute to free and open-source software for e-Government? Please take this survey

ADMS.SW Working Group

Information on collaboration

Below you can find all the practical information on the tools used by the ADMS.SW Working Group to collaborate. Please click the links if referred to another page.

The ADMS.SW Working Group: The current members of the ADMS.SW Working Group
Arkadin: Arkadin is the conferencing system that is used for the weekly Virtual Meeting of the ADMS.SW Working Group.
Public mail archive: the public mail archive of the mailing list of ADMS.SW
Issue tracker: This is where you can submit issues and comment on the issues that are already logged
e-Library: All the documents of the ADMS.SW community. This contains the Virtual Meetings agenda and minutes, the use cases, controlled vocabularies, related work and other documents that are related to the ADMS.SW specifications.
ISA Contributor Agreement v1.1