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Governance & Standards

Standards body​

The architecture is curated by ITU Study Group 20 in collaboration with the FAO. The reference architecture was adopted in July 2024.

Local governance​

  • Architecture changes are proposed through the Architecture & APIs working group.
  • A short RFC is filed in the spec repo (agrifooddata/openapi-specs).
  • After WG approval and a public comment window, the change lands.

Versioning​

  • Reference architecture — semver-like; current is v1.4.
  • APIs — semver per API. Breaking changes are announced one minor version ahead.

Breaking-change policy​

  • A deprecation notice is published when a breaking change is decided.
  • Both the old and new behaviour run in parallel for at least one minor version.
  • Deprecated endpoints are removed only in the next major version after deprecation.

Licensing​

  • Code: Apache-2.0 (pending final governance approval).
  • Documentation: CC BY 4.0.
  • The ITU/FAO reference architecture itself is published by the ITU and the FAO.