A non-profit international initiative based at Inria that systematically crawls, archives, and preserves the world's publicly available source code, including its full version-control history, and issues persistent identifiers (Software Hash Identifiers, SWHIDs) to every archived artefact.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 10 Jul 2026

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
A SWHID swh:1:dir:... cited in a paper to refer to the exact directory state used in an experiment.
Is an instance
Software Heritage's continuous mirroring of GitHub repositories.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
A snapshot kept solely on the original developer's laptop is not a Software Heritage archive object.
Not an instance
A Zenodo DOI for a software release is a different identifier scheme, complementary to SWHIDs.

Editorial commentary

Software Heritage was launched in 2016 with the stated mission of preserving all source code as part of humanity’s cultural and scientific heritage. Its archive covers over 250 million origins (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, PyPI, Debian, and many other forges and package indexes). Every archived object — file content, directory, revision, release, snapshot — gets a SWHID (e.g. swh:1:cnt:…), an intrinsic identifier derived from the content’s cryptographic hash, that allows the artefact to be cited and retrieved independently of any single forge.

References

Di Cosmo R., Zacchiroli S., 'Software Heritage: Why and How to Preserve Software Source Code', iPRES 2017. softwareheritage.org.

Also known as

Software Heritage · SWH

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Software Heritage archive"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/software-heritage-archive" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/software-heritage-archive",
  "name": "Software Heritage archive",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/software-heritage-archive",
  "description": "A non-profit international initiative based at Inria that systematically crawls, archives, and preserves the world's publicly available source code, including its full version-control history, and issues persistent identifiers (Software Hash Identifiers, SWHIDs) to every archived artefact.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/data-infrastructure#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/software-heritage-archive",
  "sameAs": [
    "Software Heritage",
    "SWH"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-10T02:06:21",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

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