Procedures

You will find here the list of procedures for contributing to the DFC Standard.

We are using Semantic Versioning.\

The process for proposing logical changes/enhancements to our repositories is as follows:

1. To propose a change/enhancement to an area of the Ontology, open a Discussion in the appropriate repository.

2. When agreed, the Discussion will be closed and an Issue created, including Acceptance Criteria .

3. Issues can then be mapped to future releases in the roadmap.

4. are made and pushed to a dedicated branch/fork for that Issue/Feature

5. Changes are merged into next{repositoryName} via a Pull Request (with reviews as required by release procedures)

The process for physically releasing the changes is as follows:

1. Once all PR's are complete & changes merged into the dedicated Release branch of each repository

2. A release will be made from that branch, marked as pre-release & latest.

3. An announcement of the release & invitation to test are made via GitHub & Slack, including cut-off date

4. On the cut-off date, all changes form the Release branch are squashed & merged into master

5. The pre-release tab is removed and a GitHub action is triggered to publish the new versions of the files for public use.

6. The Release branch is deleted

For detailed requirements for different release types... see detailed sub-sections:

Update the ontology

Our ontology describes the data concepts & relationships between them that our standard uses to describe the short supply chain ecosystem. The ontology files are written in Web Ontology Language (OWL) and also expressed in RDF/XML.

See the dedicated section.

Update the taxonomies

The Taxonomy files hold the various (SKOS compliant) hierarchies & reference lists used within the ontology. The Taxon files are expressed in JSON-LD and RDF/XML.

See the dedicated section.