We’re pleased to announce that the Open Resource Discovery (ORD) specification is now open source under the Apache-2 license on GitHub. This aligns with SAP’s commitment to promote and define open and transparent standards.

What is Open Resource Discovery ?

It’s an open standard for decentralized and standardized metadata discovery of applications and services. Most notably, we use it to publish API and Event metadata and make them easily discoverable. If you want to learn more about it, please check out our public documentation and the ORD introduction.

What Benefits brings Open Resource Discovery for you?

Currently, SAP adopts ORD to improve SAP to SAP integration and automation behind the scenes, so our customers will benefit from a better integrated SAP experience, e.g., a better API discovery experience in the Business Application Studio, tailored to your actual system landscape. You may already know some of the ORD information from the Business Accelerator Hub, as ORD is one of the ways for applications to publish to it. It will also support more concepts based on ORD in the future.

The open source release is the first step from our side to be transparent how we standardize decentralized metadata across the SAP portfolio to achieve a more aligned and integrated experience. We already profit from this, so we hope that our solution can also be of use or inspiration to others.

ORD can be adopted by anyone to address their decentralized metadata discovery problems if they implement the aggregator infrastructure and the namespace concept. The specification should provide enough flexibility for your own ideas through the extension attributes, custom types, and policies.

Next Steps

We are already talking with customers and partners about how mutual benefits could arise from this standard. Given we find the right partners and circumstances, we consider contributing the standard to an open governance body, pushing it towards becoming a full-fledged industry standard.
We are working out concepts for how customer and partner applications that adopt ORD can benefit from a better integration into the BTP and the SAP ecosystem.

Getting in Touch

With this, we hope to get early feedback (e.g., as GitHub issues) and learn how we can make this (more) valuable to you. We are inviting everyone to collaborate and make ORD even more useful across the industries. Feel free to leave a comment and to reach out to the authors of this blog article.