Specifications

Normative technical requirements. The COTS spec is the headline sub-artefact; the decision-types registry is the second.

This repository holds the discipline's normative technical requirements. Every claim a Source Engineering system makes about being conformant is checked against this repository. The specifications are versioned; the versioning policy is in versioning.md.

What is in this repository

• cots/ - the headline sub-artefact: the Chain of Orchestrable and Traceable Sources specification. JSON Schemas, YAML schemas, and TOML schemas for the COTS and its parts.
• decision-types/ - the second sub-artefact: a shared, versioned registry of typed questions and declared answer shapes. Each domain (legal, finance, healthcare, ...) writes its own sub-registry.
• versioning.md - the versioning policy. How schemas are versioned; what counts as a breaking change; what the compatibility guarantees are.
• compatibility.md - the backward-compatibility guarantees. What a v1 COTS consumer must accept from a v1.x COTS producer.
• compatibility-test-suite.md - the canonical test cases for the COTS schema. Used by the conformance suite in Source-Engineering/source-engineering-conformance.

How to engage

• Read the COTS spec first. Start at cots/README.md.
• Then the versioning policy. versioning.md is normative for how the specs evolve.
• Then the compatibility guarantees. compatibility.md is normative for what consumers can rely on.
• Propose a schema change by opening an issue and an RFC in Source-Engineering/source-engineering-governance.

Provenance

The COTS spec is the discipline's headline artefact. It is the operational form of the conceptual model in Source-Engineering/source-engineering-model. The schema is derived from the entities in the model's data model. The integrity questions in the model are the normative requirements the schema satisfies.

Organisation

The discipline is published as a set of repositories under the Source-Engineering GitHub organisation. One authoritative home per artefact:

Repo	Owns
Source-Engineering/.github	Org profile README
Source-Engineering/project-governance	Project-level governance for the governance home
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-governance	Org-wide discipline governance
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-foundations	Discipline definition, principles, terminology
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-research	Research agenda, experimental protocols
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-model	Canonical conceptual and data model
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-specifications (this repo)	Normative technical requirements; COTS spec; decision-types registry
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-architecture	Reference architecture, blueprint stack
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-reference-implementation	Working reference code
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-conformance	Conformance test suite
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-tools	Reusable software utilities
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-case-studies	Evaluated demonstrations
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-practice	Practitioner guidance
Source-Engineering/source-engineering-education	Curriculum and learning resources

Status

This is the specifications slice (Phase 2). The COTS spec is at v0.1 (initial draft). The decision-types registry is at v0.1 with the legal and finance sub-registries seeded. The versioning policy and the compatibility guarantees are normative.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.