Main Page

Welcome to the OSSelot Wiki!

This Wiki was created to facilitate day-to-day work with the resources of the OSSelot project, especially when accessing them in batch mode, e.g. as part of a software release build.

Search for a package

Find out whether a particular version of a software package is supported by OSSelot and has already been curated. A particular Web script is provided for this purpose, and an interactive Web interface is available to test and use this feature.

Obtain disclosure files

A shell script is provided to encapsulate the Web search script and obtain the related disclosure files. Another interactive Web interface is available to test and use this feature.

Create individually designed do-it-yourself disclosure files

Define a set of custom characteristics of what the disclosure file should look like, search for a package and create a custom disclosure file for it.

Obtain licensing information

Another Web script is available that also encapsulates the internal algorithm of the Web search script, but then generates a list of licenses that are used in a given software package. The script accepts as argument either a package name or a package name along with a version. In the former case the licenses of all available versions are listed, whereas in the latter the output is restricted to the specified version.

Obtain curation data in various formats using a REST interface

The entire curation data of a software package can be retrieved in JSON format, curation data of a particular version can be retrieved in RDF-XML, SPDX2TV or YAML format.

Reuse existing material in case of version mismatch

If a particular version of a software package has not been curated before, but another one that may be close to it has, then FOSSology's reuse feature can be applied. Details are given in the presentation and video material on the OSSelot home page: Please check out "Use case 2" at the OSSelot presentations.

Contributing to the OSSelot project

How to contribute to the project if a package that is not yet included with OSSelot has been externally curated? Contributions are greatly appreciated, and therefore we would like to encourage as many users as possible to contribute. The more versions of more packages that are curated, the more beneficial the OSSelot project will be. However, to maintain confidence in the material, a rigorous vetting process was instituted. Volunteers are asked to first contact the OSSelot Officer via email. The easiest next step is then probably to arrange a video conference, get to know each other, and understand the basic principles of the OSSelot curation process. From that moment, new software packages can be curated and provided in the fork tree. The maintainer will then review the newly provided curation data in close collaboration with the contributor, and once the review is successful, the new curation data will be included and made publicly available through the repository. The contributor's and reviewer's names will be indicated in the README file of the package.

Best practices

How to curate data

High-quality curation data are the cornerstone of the OSSelot project. To ensure that this quality is maintained, every contribution is thoroughly reviewed and only curators with sufficient expertise in FOSS licensing contribute to the database. A curation guideline on how data are curated for the OSSelot project is given here to ensure consistency.

SPDX2TV template

To avoid misunderstandings when exchanging SPDX files, an SPDX tag:value template is given here. This shows which tags are used in the OSSelot project and how they are interpreted.

FOSSology

In order to use the FOSSology Open Source curation administration tool in connection with the OSSelot project (when re-using the data and also when contributing to the project), a number of conventions should be observed.

Scancode

Normally, the Scancode Open Source scanning tool is used under the control of FOSSology in this project; however, to fine-tune or confirm the results it may be necessary to run the tool separately from command line. If this is done, the command line options should match the conventions of the OSSelot project.