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Roadmap 2026-2028

Please find below a proposed three-year roadmap developed by AboutCode in collaboration with the community to strengthen ClearlyDefined’s technical foundations, expand its capabilities, and grow its global adoption.

Goals of the Proposal​

The roadmap is designed to address key challenges while positioning ClearlyDefined for long-term success. The proposal focuses on several foundational changes to improve efficiency and reach:

  • Combine ClearlyDefined and AboutCode operations and backends when possible to enable scan data reuse and avoid duplicated, wasted compute resources across ecosystems, creating mutually beneficial synergies
  • Refactor ClearlyDefined backend and frontend to reduce the technical debts and improve data quality
  • Enroll new sponsors to share the cloud compute costs
  • Unlock data access for increased community adoption
  • Enable new use cases around security and project health

These efforts are intended to reduce costs while improving performance, usability, and adoption.

Themes by Year​

The roadmap is structured around three phases, each with a distinct focus:

2026: Strengthening the Foundation

  • Reduce technical debt and operating costs
  • Improve the harvesting and curation queue and user interface
  • Facilitate community contributions

2027: Expanding Architecture and Use Cases

  • Migrate to a federated data architecture
  • Further reduce hosting costs
  • Unlock broader data access
  • Initiate work on vulnerabilities, project health, and risk use cases

2028: Delivering Advanced Capabilities

  • Deploy security-related use cases
  • Deliver project health insights and analytics

In parallel, ongoing work will support infrastructure maintenance, data quality, and community engagement throughout all three years.

The Six Core Objectives​

The roadmap organizes its deliverables around six key objectives:

1) Create better license and package scans, faster and more efficiently​

  • Enable reusing scans across ClearlyDefined harvests and AboutCode data collections
  • Design a priority mechanism to scan packages based on actual usage
  • Improve the performance of ScanCode for faster and more cost efficient scans
  • Improve ScanCode license detection based from the analysis of ClearlyDefined curated data
  • Adopt federated data design with data mirrored across multiple hosts to improve service availability and reduce costs, reusing existing scans

2) Reduce technical debt​

  • Update dependencies to latest versions
  • Refactor storage of scans and attachments
  • Switch to the Open Source DocumentDB from the proprietary MongoDB
  • Maintain and improve the ClearlyDefined code base, CI/CD, and infrastructure
  • Update project documentation to reflect new and ongoing development
  • Facilitate outreach and onboarding for new contributors and sponsors

3) Shared scans for shared costs​

  • Expand the pool of organizations hosting scans to share the scanning costs
  • Design new prioritized scan queue to scan packages in an order that aligns with business needs
  • Integrate distributed scanning with federated data access with on-premises, private data usage

4) Integrate PURL and SBOM for easier interoperability​

  • Create new API endpoints to access ClearlyDefined data keyed by PURL
  • Create a new SBOM API endpoint to expose reference package data in SBOM formats
  • Adopt PURL as a core identifier in the database and file store

5) Improve curation processes and user experience​

  • Develop and deploy a new and improved UI for efficient data curation
  • Make it easier for organization to contribute their curations back in bulk
  • Improve the data models for curation storage
  • Create a new specification for multi-stakeholder data curations exchange

6) Support for more use cases​

  • Security with vulnerability data
  • Data for project health and lifecycle events and analytics
  • Usage to find the most used Open Source components and drive scan priorities

These objectives reflect a balance between technical modernization, ecosystem collaboration, and expanded functionality.