OSCAL Project Structure
The OSCAL project is made up of several components, each of which lives in its own repository on GitHub under the usnistgov organization.
Where components use code defined in other components, these repositories form a network of dependencies:
OSCAL Core Projects
These projects provide the central functionality and documentation of the OSCAL project and are the primary focus of the NIST OSCAL team.
OSCAL
The OSCAL repository is the core repository in the OSCAL project. It contains:
- The Metaschema modules that define the OSCAL models
- Artifacts published with every release, including:
- XML and JSON schemas for all models
- XML transformation pipelines for XML/JSON conversion
Repository: https://github.com/usnistgov/OSCAL
OSCAL-Pages
OSCAL-Pages is the repository that contains the source code to the content site for the overall project. This content includes OSCAL tutorials, other educational material, news, and event information. Additionally, this repository also includes processing specifications for certain models, such as profile resolution. The source code for the generated reference documentation is not managed here, but in a separate repository for ease of maintenance and deployment.
Repository: https://github.com/usnistgov/OSCAL-Pages
OSCAL-Reference
OSCAL-Reference contains the source code for web page templates and supporting automation to generate reference documentation from each model for each released version in the OSCAL repository. Although presented in a unified website with content from the source code in the OSCAL-Pages repository, it is managed separately for ease of maintenance and deployment.
Repository: https://github.com/usnistgov/OSCAL-Reference
liboscal-java
The liboscal-java repository contains a suite of Java libraries based on metaschema-java that implement common OSCAL operations such as reading/writing artifacts, profile resolution, and validation.
Repository: https://github.com/usnistgov/liboscal-java
OSCAL-CLI
The oscal-cli repository provides an easy-to-use command-line interface (CLI) based on liboscal-java.
Repository: https://github.com/usnistgov/oscal-cli
OSCAL-Content
The OSCAL content repository provides a library of official NIST-maintained OSCAL examples in XML, JSON, and YAML.
Repository: https://github.com/usnistgov/oscal-content
NIST-Maintained OSCAL Dependencies
These NIST projects underpin the OSCAL project, but are governed separately, outside of the OSCAL Program.
Metaschema
Metaschema is the modeling language that OSCAL uses to define all models. This repository contains the Metaschema specification, tutorials, and test cases.
Repository: https://github.com/usnistgov/metaschema
Metaschema-Java
The metaschema-java repository contains the Java implementation of Metaschema, providing the toolchain used by liboscal-java to parse and validate OSCAL artifacts as defined in the Metaschema modeling language.
Repository: https://github.com/usnistgov/metaschema-java
Metaschema XSLT
The metaschema-xslt repository contains the XSLT implementation of Metaschema to parse and validate OSCAL artifacts as defined in its modeling language. It publishes XML-based pipelines (XSLT and XProc) to perform various operations for OSCAL, like generation of model documentation, schemas, and content converters.
Repository: https://github.com/usnistgov/metaschema-xslt
Hugo-USWDS
Both the OSCAL Project and the Metaschema share this repository as a common website template based on the US Web Design System.
Repository: https://github.com/usnistgov/hugo-uswds
Other NIST-Maintained OSCAL Tools
These projects are managed by the OSCAL team, but at times, might be given a lower priority than the core OSCAL projects.
OSCAL-Deep-Diff
A schema-agnostic diffing tool and library built to compare OSCAL JSON documents.
Repository: https://github.com/usnistgov/oscal-deep-diff
OSCAL-XSLT
This repository contains a collection of XSLT-based utilities for displaying and processing OSCAL documents.
Repository: https://github.com/usnistgov/oscal-xslt
Other Projects
What about projects not on this list?
NIST OSCAL Team staff, or NIST staff more generally, develops software for their own education or experimentation. If you see NIST staff, either on the usnistgov GitHub organization or user accounts associated with official NIST work, these are not considered official NIST projects until they are included in the categories above. Individuals may pursue work on them, but they have no official maintenance or support guarantees from this team.