EXPRESS Language Foundation Specifications

This document is available in its rendered forms here:

• EXPRESS Language Foundation

Introduction

This repository contains official specifications and directives maintained by the EXPRESS Language Foundation (ELF). The EXPRESS Language Foundation facilitates the education, standardization, research, promotion, definition, and usage of information modelling and programming languages, with a focus on the EXPRESS language family.

The specifications include:

5001

Annotated EXPRESS — Specification for documenting EXPRESS models with structured annotations

5002

EXPRESS language pretty print format — Specification for standardized formatting of EXPRESS language constructs

5003

EXPRESS documentation migration — Specification for migrating EXPRESS documentation to the new format

5004

EXPRESS schema manifest — Specification for creating a manifest of EXPRESS schemas

5005

EXPRESS changes — Specification for documenting changes to the EXPRESS language and its specifications

5006

EXPRESS mapping language — Specification for expressing reference paths amongst a set of EXPRESS schemas

The directives include:

101

Standardization and publication — Directive on the ELF standardization and publication processes

102

Standard document requirements — Directive on requirements for ELF standard documents

103

Patent policy — Directive on the ELF patent policy

104

Guidelines for the implementation of the patent policy — Directive providing guidelines for the implementation of the ELF patent policy

105

Intellectual property rights policy — Directive on the ELF intellectual property rights policy

The specifications and directives are written in Metanorma to generate standardized documentation in multiple formats.

Structure

sources/

source files for EXPRESS specifications and ELF directives in Metanorma format.

sources/annotated-express/

Annotated EXPRESS specification

sources/express-pretty/

EXPRESS language pretty print format specification

sources/expressdocs-migration/

Migration of EXPRESS documentation to EXPRESSdocs

sources/express-schema-manifest/

EXPRESS schema manifest specification

sources/express-changes/

EXPRESS changes specification

sources/express-mapping/

EXPRESS mapping language specification

sources/directive-standardization/

ELF Directive 101: Standardization and publication

sources/directive-document-requirements/

ELF Directive 102: Standard document requirements

sources/directive-patent-policy/

ELF Directive 103: Patent policy

sources/directive-ipr-guidelines/

ELF Directive 104: Guidelines for the implementation of the patent policy

sources/directive-ipr-policy/

ELF Directive 105: Intellectual property rights policy

Building documentation

This repository uses Metanorma to build standardized documentation.

Installing build tools

See https://www.metanorma.org/install/ for detailed installation instructions.

Building locally

If you have Metanorma installed locally, run:

metanorma site generate

Building with Docker

If you prefer to use Docker, run:

docker run -v "$(pwd)":/metanorma -w /metanorma -it metanorma/mn metanorma site generate

Generated Formats

The build process generates documentation in multiple formats:

• HTML — Web-friendly format with navigation

• PDF — Print-ready format

• XML — Machine-readable format

• RXL — Relaton XML bibliographic format

License

Copyright EXPRESS Language Foundation.

ELF documents are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. The full license text is available in the LICENSE file.