Standard

The Open Contracting Data Standard includes a technical specification made up of:

• An extended JSON Schema that defines objects and fields for describing a contracting process

• A set of codelists that define standard values for several fields

• A set of rules for constructing identifiers for contracting processes and organizations

• A set of rules for merging individual ‘releases’ into a consolidated ‘record’ of a contracting process

• A set of rules for transforming between JSON and tabular serializations

• An extension mechanism for describing additional fields

This section describes the processes for maintaining these assets. See the Normative and non-normative policy for details on which sections of the documentation are normative or not.

Documentation is written in Markdown syntax with recommonmark building on Commonmark.

• The schema
  • Forward and backwards compatibility
  • Our extensions to JSON Schema
• Contributing
  • Getting started
  • Proposing changes
  • Logging changes
  • Reviewing changes
  • Repository management
  • Modelling approaches
• Translation
  • Authors
  • Translation workflow
  • Quality assurance
  • Understanding Transifex
  • Using Transifex
  • Technical processes for translation
  • Technical implementation of translation
• Technical processes
  • Standard repository
  • Maintenance
  • Building the documentation
  • Changing the theme
  • Deploying the documentation
  • Generating documentation PDFs

History

For the history of standard development, read:

• 2018 OCDS objectives and design decisions

• 2018 Extension mechanism design decisions

• 2018 Extension registry design decisions

• 2018 Extension classifications and rationales

• 2018 Short history of standard development

• The Development section of ODS’ Standards Lab

• 2014 technical scoping

The standard and ocds-extensions repositories contain all public discussions about standard development.