All artifacts in S-RAMP contain a set of core properties such as name, description, and creation date. The server automatically sets many of these properties when the artifact is added or updated. Other properties such as description are set by clients. Every artifact has an Artifact Model and an Artifact Type. These two properties determine what kind of artifact it is.

Some artifact types contain additional core properties. For example, the Document artifact type includes additional core properties of contentType and contentSize, while the XsdDocument artifact type includes the targetNamespace property.

In addition to the core properties, an artifact may have additional properties called the custom properties set on it by clients. These custom properties are arbitrary name-value pairs. A custom property may not have the same name as a core property.

An ontology is a hierarchy of tags defined as a subset of the OWL Lite language. A classifier is a node in an ontology that is previously uploaded to the repository. Classifiers are like keywords or tags except that they are hierarchical. Every artifact has a collection of classifiers configured by the client.

Here is an example of how you can configure the repository with a pre-defined set of hierarchical tags (classifiers) that can be associated with an artifact:

Consider a case where a repository administrator defines and uploads the following ontology:

World
  |-> North America
     |-> United States
         |-> Alabama
         |-> Alaska
     |-> Mexico
     |-> Canada
  |-> South America
  |-> Australia

Once this ontology is added to the repository, the clients can add classifiers such as #Alaska or #Canada on artifacts. This provides a way to tag artifacts in interesting and meaningful ways, and a useful means of querying.

An S-RAMP relationship is a uni-directional link between a source artifact and a target artifact. Artifacts can have arbitrary, client-defined relationships. Every relationship has a name and a target artifact. For example, a client may define a relationship with name "documentedBy" between a wsdl artifact and a text or PDF artifact, indicating that the latter provides documentation for the former.