Governance

UKS is an open draft maintained by the SaberTools project, published under the MIT license. Anyone may implement, fork, or build tooling against it without restriction. The stewardship model is intentionally lightweight today, with a stated intent to transfer governance to a neutral body once the spec stabilizes.

The full policy is in spec/GOVERNANCE.md. This page summarizes it.

Versioning (SemVer)

Bump	Changes	Compatibility
Patch (3.0.x)	Clarifications, example fixes, schema bug fixes	Backward compatible
Minor (3.x.0)	New optional fields, new enum values, new examples	Backward compatible
Major (x.0.0)	Removals, renames, structural changes	Breaking — migration guide + 12-month maintenance window

Existing packets always remain valid across patch and minor releases. Consumers must handle unknown fields gracefully.

Enum extension policy

• Extensible (source_type, source_domain, entity_type, relationship_type) — unknown values prefixed x- / x_ are accepted and treated as "unknown" rather than rejected. This is how the knowledge vocabulary grows between releases.
• Safety (closed) (evidence_grade, clinical_status) — no extension; mis-grading is a safety hazard. New values need a minor bump.
• Execution (closed) (directive_type, action_type, trigger_type, …) — no extension; an unrecognized verb is one no runtime can execute.

Any structured data may also be carried in _extensions without affecting conformance.

Path to a standard

IANA media-type registration (application/uks+json) prerequisites:

1. ✅ Open-source reference implementation (SaberTools)
2. ✅ Two independent interoperable implementations (@uks/cli, @uks/sdk, uks-sdk agree on the conformance corpus)
3. 🟡 A 30-day public comment round — open now
4. 🟡 Stable release, no breaking changes for 6 months (freeze in progress)
5. ⬜ Neutral steward identified (the W3C Community Group will provide this)

See the Call for Comments, the IANA registration, and the W3C Community Group.

Decision authority

Decision	Authority
Patch release	Maintainer
Minor release	Maintainer + 7-day comment
Major release	Maintainer + 30-day comment + 2 implementations
Governance change	Public RFC + 60-day comment

→ Related: Call for Comments · Community