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<chapter id="chap-AppStream-About">
<title>About AppStream</title>
<section id="about-whatis">
<title>What is AppStream?</title>
<para>
AppStream is a cross-distro effort for enhancing the metadata available about software components in the Linux and free-software ecosystem.
One of the project's goals is to make building software-center applications possible, and make interaction with the package sources of a
distribution smarter.
AppStream provides specifications for meta-information which is shipped by upstream projects and can be consumed by other software.
The meta-information includes data which is interesting to display in software centers and is mainly useful for end-users, as well as descriptions
about the public interfaces a software component provides, which is mainly useful for developers, 3rd-party software installers and for automatically
installing missing components on a distribution, for example missing firmware or mimetype-handlers.
</para>
<para>
Distributors provide metadata as well, which describes all components available in a software repository. That data is composed of the upstream-metainfo
and some other sources.
AppStream also provides specifications for things like a screenshot-service, application ratings & reviews etc.
</para>
<para>
All parts of AppStream are distribution-agnostic, and therefore it is easily possible to build software management tools with it that work
on any distribution implementing the AppStream specification.
</para>
<section>
<title>Architecture</title>
<para>
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<imagedata fileref="architecture.png" format="PNG" width="80%" />
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</section>
</section>
</chapter>
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