Discussion: Support for SPDX 3.0

[goneall]

I was originally thinking that it would be too difficult to support the SPDX 3.0 in a spreadsheet format.

I may have come up with an approach that could implement it through a code generation process similar to the spdx-model-to-java code generator. Possible just an extension of the code generator.

The output would be:

• One sheet per Element type with the name of the sheet derived from the type name
  • We would only generate a sheet if the Element of that type was actually found
  • The sheets should be sorted in some logical fashion (e.g. Documents first, Collections second, ...)
• One row per Element of that type
• One column per property within the element
• Non Element object types would be flattened as additional columns with the names derived from the non Element class name and property name
• Values for properties with a range of an Element would be the Element ID

Questions:

• Would this be of value? Are there people/organizations who would use this?
• What feedback or improvements can be made to the design approach?

[goneall]

BTW - I'd really enjoy implementing this (it would be a nice challenging technical project) - but wouldn't mind at all a couple collaborators. Leave a comment if you're interested in collaborating.

[bact]

CSV on the Web https://csvw.org/ may give some ideas on how to deal with data schema and CSV (any table like structure)

[bact]

I do have an interest in this.
My hypothetical use case is human-machine collaboration in SBOM generation.

SBOM generator may able to collect metadata and extract/derive additional information for enrichment, but there will be certain information that need human to answer

The idea is to have a spreadsheet as a user interface for this human-machine collaboration. SBOM generator will populate as much as possible information, then give a spreadsheet to human, human fill in, give back to the generator to do last pass of linking/validation before producing the final SBOM.

The same workflow may apply for non-SBOM use case like incident report.

I'm trying to see if CSVW can do this, but it still need many files. A proper Workbook (many sheets in one file) maybe easier for packaging purpose.

[goneall]

I'm trying to see if CSVW can do this, but it still need many files. A proper Workbook (many sheets in one file) maybe easier for packaging purpose.

Workbooks also allow for better formatting and human readability.