Open Resource Discovery (ORD) is a protocol that lets applications and services self-describe their exposed resources and capabilities — APIs, events, entity types and more — through an ORD document served from /.well-known/open-resource-discovery. It supports both static documentation and runtime, tenant-specific configuration. Originally an SAP standard, now governed under NeoNephos; Apache 2.0, released frequently (v1.17.0, October 2026).
Open Resource Discovery
Open Resource Discovery (ORD) answers the question an API catalog has to ask of every system: what do you expose? An application publishes ORD documents describing its resources and capabilities, and a consumer — a catalog, a portal, an agent — reads them from a well-known endpoint instead of scraping documentation. Its README describes it as an open standard by SAP, currently geared towards the SAP ecosystem, and governed by NeoNephos, a Linux Foundation Europe project.
- A well-known entry point - The ORD Document API, defined in
spec/v1/DocumentAPI.oas3.yaml, starts at/.well-known/open-resource-discovery, which points to the ORD documents a system serves. - Schemas you can validate against -
Document.schema.yamlandConfiguration.schema.yamldefine the documents, published with the spec and as the@open-resource-discovery/specificationnpm package. - Static and runtime - The same format covers documentation published once and tenant-specific configuration discovered at runtime.
- Overlays - An
OrdOverlay.schema.yamland tooling repositories created in 2026 let third parties layer changes over ORD documents — a close cousin of OpenAPI Overlays. - Describes other contracts - ORD documents point at OpenAPI definitions and other resource definitions rather than replacing them; the project has also started on A2A and MCP Server Card tooling.
- Released often - 39 GitHub releases since v1.7.1 in October 2023; v1.17.0 on 12 October 2026.
