This site links to and indexes schemas from all kinds of places: open source projects, standards organizations, consortiums, and commercial organizations. Join to have your work listed and indexed so it can be found and used.
Persistent Schema IDs beginning with https://id.schemas.pub can be registered here and used in an "$id" keyword (JSON Schema) or similar. Contact us for an organizational membership to get started.
Schemas.pub is a pilot project of the Data Transfer Initiative, built and hosted to promote interoperability and consistency of data exchange, especially for personal data transfer.
There are some data types we exchange over the Internet quite frequently and successfully: calendar items, tasks and contacts for example. The standards for calendar items and contacts were written in 1998. Those standards use a unique data format which made them a lot more work to define, and the standards consensus process took years.
Since then, JSON and XML have made basic data formatting much more interoperable and schema languages for those formats have emerged. JSON Schema and other schema languages for JSON can quickly and easily show what some data consumer expects in a particular data file, and XML Schema Definition Language does the same for XML.
Why have better data formats and schema languages not made it easier to define a standard? Why do we have no widely interoperable standard for "an online photo album" or "a restaurant reservation"? Instead of making it easier to define standards, modern tools have encouraged the proliferation of "unilateral" data definitions -- Web APIs with schemas defined unilaterally by the host of that API. Thus, most services that host common data (like digital photos in albums, or restaurant info and reservation data!) uses different schemas.
Is this really a problem? In practice API users just translate API data into their own format, sometimes aided by schema definitions and sometimes not. Yet, we think this could be made somewhat better by allowing organizations to publish schemas that have some real thought behind them, alongside tools for using and applying those schemas, and reputational markers to show which data schemas have implementations, interoperability, open licenses or standards governance. We welcome your thoughts.
We're building the site as we learn about what's most useful to publishers of schemas as well as implementers searching for solid information. Contact us if you have feedback on functionality.
To get started, search for a schema you're interested in and see how it's defined, some examples, and how it's implemented. If you have a schema you think should be listed, create an account and add it.