The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) has certified more than three thousand hardware projects since its certification program began, from 3D printers to educational tools to environmental sensors. Each certified project receives a unique identifier, a short alphanumeric code that serves as official proof the project meets the Open Source Hardware Definition. It is the hardware world's equivalent of a DOI: a stable, trustworthy marker that says a project did the work to be open.
The trouble is that this proof of openness has stayed inside OSHWA's own certification database. It did not circulate more widely. Most certified projects had no representation on Wikidata, for example, the largest open knowledge graph in the world. Few that do exist there cannot be linked back to their certification status. A researcher studying the open hardware ecosystem, or a maker looking for certified projects to build on, had no way to query this information as linked, structured data. The certification exists, but the knowledge graph does not have linked data about it.
I worked as a member of the SEEKCommons project team to close this gap in partnership with OSHWA.
A new identifier for Wikidata
The first step was proposing a new Wikidata property: the OSHWA identifier. Every certified project's code follows a simple pattern, a two-letter country prefix followed by six digits, and that code can now be attached directly to a Wikidata item. Once a project's identifier is on Wikidata, it becomes possible to ask questions that used to require manually reading through OSHWA's website: which certified projects exist in a given country, which are already documented elsewhere on Wikidata, which are missing entirely. The certification stops being a static badge and becomes a queryable fact, sitting alongside everything else the knowledge graph already knows. Why is this important? Well, as part of the SEEKCommons research goals, we wanted to make collaborative projects more visible (more findable, accessible, interoperable, reproducible, but, also, and most importantly, governed with care by the community of OSHW practitioners). This is why I proposed to create an identifier for Wikidata.
A data model for open hardware
To establish the identifier in the Wikidata ecosystem, I had to build a broader set of "Wikidata entity schemas" tailored to OSHW, that is, structured ways of representing an OSHW project's documentation, licensing, and versioning that aligns with SEEKCommons's wider goals around open research infrastructure, including how these projects connect to socioenvironmental knowledge production. The aim was to establish a model that is detailed and specific enough to be useful to researchers and makers, but general enough to scale across thousands of projects in different areas of OSHW, from PCB designs to full mechanical assemblies.
Checking compliance automatically
Certification is only meaningful if the documentation behind it holds up over time. Design files can go missing, projects and licensing terms can change, and mirrors can drift from their original sources. So, the second part of my work was to create a "validator," that is, a script that checks each certified project against OSHWA's own compliance checkpoints. Are the design files easy to find? Are the open and closed parts of the project clearly distinguished? Is the OSHWA mark used correctly? Is the trademark and license situation clear? Is the documentation complete enough that someone else could actually replicate the project, in the spirit of the FAIR principles? Is that documentation free to access, and does it include images?
Most OSHWA projects link out to a project website, and a large share of those point to GitHub repositories, so the validator queries OSHWA's own certification API directly and follows those links to check each project's public documentation against the eight checkpoints. The result is a repeatable, transparent way to monitor the health of the certification list over time, not just at the moment a project is certified.
So… why is this important?
It is important to say that none of this is meant to replace OSHWA's certification process. Quite the opposite, it is meant to create a rich layer of metadata about the certification process itself using open linked data. Once certified projects have stable identifiers on Wikidata, connected to a proper data model and checked by a validator, the open hardware community gains something it never had: a queryable, up-to-date map of what open hardware actually exists, who built it, and whether its documentation still lives up to the standard it was certified against. As a community, we gain from the relational richness of the Wikidata graph, but we also contribute meta-information about OSHW projects more broadly.
The project is now accomplished, so we are just waiting on the final details. The identifier proposal is currently moving through Wikidata's community review process, which is important and takes time, and the schema and validator work has been accomplished as well.
This work celebrates the partnership between the SEEKCommons project and OSHWA to bring something of value to the community. I would like to thank the U.S. NSF SEEKCommons project for supporting the research and development work I report here (NSF grant #2226425).
