Versioningi

Versioningi is a theoretical and practical framework for version control and metadata of digital artifacts, focusing on machine-readable provenance and cross-organizational compatibility. It extends traditional version numbering with a graph-based model and a standardized metadata vocabulary.

Origin: developed by the Versioningi Working Group within the Open Software Coalition in the early 2020s as a response to growing complexity of releases across languages, platforms, and deployment environments. It aims to complement semantic versioning rather than replace it.

Core concepts: A version identifier consists of a primary version string (major.minor.patch) plus optional qualifiers such as pre-release, build, locale, and channel. Each version can participate in a version graph with edges describing relations like derives_from, supersedes, or conflicts_with. Versioning policies define compatibility guarantees and release criteria.

Metadata and tooling: Versioningi specifies a JSON-based metadata container with fields for timestamp, author, repository, environment, locale, hash, and provenance. Tooling includes validators and graph explorers that visualize version lineage and compatibility matrices.

Adoption and examples: Used by several packaging registries and CI/CD pipelines to record reproducible builds and multilingual releases. It supports container images, libraries, and data artifacts. Example: a release of a multilingual software package may produce multiple variants tied to different locales via the same base version.

Criticism and status: Some practitioners find the model complex and argue it adds overhead for small projects; others praise the reproducibility and interoperability gains. Versioningi remains a developing standard with ongoing work on formal specification and reference implementations.