Sourcemeta JSON Schema Standard Library

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Browse the schemas at https://schemas.sourcemeta.com/sourcemeta/std

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Building professional OpenAPI specifications demands precision, but mastering JSON Schema is hard. This library eliminates that burden by providing production-ready schemas that encode industry standards and best practices. Reference them directly in your API specifications and focus on what matters: designing great APIs.

Led and maintained by a member of the JSON Schema Technical Steering Committee

Use this library to:

• Build production-grade OpenAPI specifications without writing schemas from scratch
• Skip the JSON Schema learning curve while maintaining expert-level quality
• Meet compliance and regulatory requirements with standards-based validation
• Establish a solid foundation for your organisation's API governance program

Warning

This project is in its early stages with much more to come. We need your feedback to shape its future. Please share your thoughts and suggestions on what you would like to see.

Note

All schemas target JSON Schema 2020-12, the dialect used by OpenAPI v3.1 and later. Earlier JSON Schema dialects will be supported in the future.

📑 Table of Contents

• 📘 Standards
• 🚀 Getting Started
  • From Sourcemeta Schemas
  • From GitHub Releases
  • Using Git Submodules
  • Using Vendorpull
• 📄 License
• 🤝 Contributing
• 📧 Contact

📘 Standards

This library provides schemas that encode aspects of the following standards. Note that these standards often contain concepts and specifications that cannot be represented as schemas. We extract and formalize the portions that can be expressed as JSON Schema definitions.

Organisation	Standard	Title
IEEE	IEEE Std 754-2019	IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic
IEEE	IEEE Std 1003.1-2017	IEEE Standard for Information Technology—Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) Base Specifications, Issue 7
IETF	RFC 3066	Tags for the Identification of Languages
IETF	RFC 3986	Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax
IETF	RFC 4648	The Base16, Base32, and Base64 Data Encodings
IETF	RFC 4918	HTTP Extensions for Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV)
IETF	RFC 5322	Internet Message Format
IETF	RFC 5646	Tags for Identifying Languages (BCP 47)
IETF	RFC 5789	PATCH Method for HTTP
IETF	RFC 6901	JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Pointer
IETF	RFC 7807	Problem Details for HTTP APIs
IETF	RFC 8141	Uniform Resource Names (URNs)
IETF	RFC 9110	HTTP Semantics
ISO	ISO 3166-1:2020	Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions — Part 1: Country codes
ISO	ISO 4217:2015	Codes for the representation of currencies and funds
ISO	ISO 639:2023	Codes for the representation of names of languages
ISO	ISO 8601-1:2019	Date and time — Representations for information interchange — Part 1: Basic rules
ISO	ISO 8601-2:2019	Date and time — Representations for information interchange — Part 2: Extensions
ISO	ISO 80000-1:2022	Quantities and units — Part 1: General
ISO/IEC	ISO/IEC 2382:2015	Information technology — Vocabulary
ISO/IEC	ISO/IEC 9899:2024	Programming languages — C
JSON-RPC	JSON-RPC 2.0	JSON-RPC 2.0 Specification
JSON Schema	Draft 2020-12	JSON Schema: A Media Type for Describing JSON Documents
W3C	XML Schema Part 2	XML Schema Datatypes Second Edition

To request coverage of another standard, please open an issue on GitHub.

🚀 Getting Started

While you can always copy-paste schemas directly, here are more convenient and maintainable ways to consume them.

From Sourcemeta Schemas

We periodically publish the JSON Schema standard library to Sourcemeta Schemas, our free service for hosting open-source schemas. Each schema gets a unique HTTPS URL that you can directly reference from your OpenAPI specifications using the $ref keyword. For example:

schema:
  type: object
  properties:
    email:
      $ref: 'https://schemas.sourcemeta.com/sourcemeta/std/<version>/ietf/email/address'

To de-reference and embed these external URLs when distributing your OpenAPI specification, use standard tools like redocly bundle.

From GitHub Releases

We publish archives of the JSON Schema standard library to GitHub Releases. Download and extract an archive to your preferred location, then reference the JSON files from your OpenAPI specifications using the $ref keyword with a relative path. For example:

schema:
  type: object
  properties:
    email:
      $ref: "../path/to/sourcemeta-std/ietf/email/address.json"

Using Git Submodules

If your OpenAPI specification lives in a Git repository, you can add this library as a git submodule. This approach keeps the schemas versioned alongside your code and ensures consistent access across your team. Add the submodule to your repository:

git submodule add https://github.com/sourcemeta/std std

Then reference the schemas using the $ref keyword with a relative path. For example:

schema:
  type: object
  properties:
    email:
      $ref: './std/schemas/ietf/email/address.json'

Using Vendorpull

Vendorpull is our tool for vendoring Git repositories, which we use across our projects. It provides an easier alternative to submodules by committing upstream contents directly into your repository while letting you easily manage and update them. Add this line to your DEPENDENCIES file:

std https://github.com/sourcemeta/std v<x.y.z>

Then pull the library into your vendor directory:

./vendor/vendorpull/pull std

Reference the schemas using the $ref keyword with a relative path. For example:

schema:
  type: object
  properties:
    email:
      $ref: './vendor/std/schemas/ietf/email/address.json'

📄 License

While the project is publicly available on GitHub, it operates under a source-available license rather than a traditional open-source model. You may freely use these schemas for non-commercial purposes, but commercial use requires a paid commercial license.

We are happy to discuss OEM and white-label distribution options for incorporating these schemas into commercial products.

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions! By sending a pull request, you agree to our contributing guidelines. Meaningful contributions to this repository can be taken into consideration towards a discounted (or even free) commercial license.

Tip

Do you want to level up your JSON Schema skills? Check out learnjsonschema.com, our growing JSON Schema documentation website, our JSON Schema for OpenAPI video course, and our O'Reilly book Unifying Business, Data, and Code: Designing Data Products with JSON Schema.

📧 Contact

If you have any questions or comments, don't hesitate in opening a ticket on GitHub Discussions or writing to us at [email protected].