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ECMA-427 1st Edition

The PURL (Package-URL) specification has been standardized with ECMA-427 1st Edition.

The content of ECMA-427 is a subset of the overall PURL specification but its content defines the normative standard.

Some elements of the specification that are not currently included in ECMA-427 are the How-to guides, the PURL Test Schema, the PURL test suite , and the data for registered PURL Type definitions.

A reference to the "PURL standard" is always a reference to ECMA-427. A reference to the "PURL specification" may refer to information from ECMA-427 or from the broader PURL specification which is maintained in the purl-spec repository on GitHub.

The key elements of ECMA-427 are:

  • Introduction
  • Clause 1 - Scope: Brief description of the PURL Standard scope.
  • Clause 2 - Conformance: Statement of general requirements for conformance to the Standard.
  • Clause 3 - Normative References: Lists 3 external documents that are normative references for the PURL standard.
  • Clause 4 - An "informative (non-normative) overview of the PURL Standard.
  • Clause 5 - Package-URL Specification: The core specification for PURL covering why/how a PURL is a URL, defined characters, character encoding, and rules for each PURL component
  • Clause 6 - Package-URL Type Definition Schema: A human-friendly version of the JSON schema. You can also access the JSON Schema or an interactive HTML version of the Schema from the Schemas page below.
  • Annex A- PURL Type Definition: Copy of the JSON file for purl-type-definition.schema-1.0.json