Frictionless Data
Specifications

Design Philosophy

Our specifications follow our design philosophy:

  • Simplicity: seek zen-like simplicity in which there is nothing to add and nothing to take away.
  • Extensibility: design for extensibility and customisation. This makes hard things possible and allows for future evolution -- nothing we build will be perfect.
  • Human-editable and machine-usable: specs should preserve human readability and editability whilst making machine-use easy.
  • Reuse: reuse and build on existing standards and formats wherever possible.
  • Cross technology: support a broad range of languages, technologies and infrastructures -- avoid being tied to any one specific system.

This philosophy is itself based on the overall design principles of the Frictionless Data project:

  1. Focused: We have a sharp focus on one part of the data chain, one specific feature – packaging – and a few specific types of data (e.g. tabular).
  2. Web Oriented: We build for the web using formats that are web "native" such as JSON, work naturally with HTTP such as plain text CSVs (which stream).
  3. Distributed: we design for a distributed ecosystem with no centralized, single point of failure or dependence.
  4. Open: Anyone should be able to freely and openly use and reuse what we build. Our community is open to everyone.
  5. Existing Tooling: Integrate as easily as possible with existing tools both by building integrations and designing for direct use – for example we like CSV because everyone has a tool that can access CSV.
  6. Simple, Lightweight: Add the minimum, do the least required, keep it simple. For example, use the most basic formats, require only the most essential metadata, data should have nothing extraneous.

Participate and Contribute

This effort is community-run and contributions, comments and corrections are warmly welcomed. Most work proceeds in an RFC-style manner with discussion on the forum and the chat.

Material is kept in a git repo on GitHub - fork and submit a pull request to add material. There is also an issue tracker which can be used for specific issues or suggestions.

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