Abstract
This chapter examines the critical task of governing the open source environment with an open source repository. As organizations move to higher levels of maturity, the ability to manage and understand the open source environment is one of the most critical aspects of the architecture. Metadata can be defined as information pertaining to the open source environment that the organization defines as critical to the business. Successful open source governance requires a comprehensive strategy and framework which will be presented through historical, current-state, and future perspectives. The author expects that by understanding the role of open source metadata and the repository within, researchers will continue to expand the body of knowledge around asset management and overall architecture governance.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Governance: Governance is the act of managing the technical environment as a portfolio of assets. Managing the portfolio would include activities like domain analysis, inventory management, and reuse.
Metadata: Metadata is information that describes the characteristics of an asset. This information may be in the form of structured metadata like title, description, and author; or unstructured metadata like implementation instructions or test cases.
Maturity Model: A maturity model describes an evolutionary path where activities/best practices are introduced in order to create a more stable, consistent, and definable environment.
Asset: An asset is any artifact that the organization defines as critical to the business.
Model: A meta-model defines the basic structure of the information being collected about an asset.
Reuse: Reuse describes the activities of identification, generalization, development, and management which support practitioners utilizing existing assets vs. building from scratch.