Project legal and redistribution

Required notice

This project is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by NEMA, MITA, or the DICOM Standards Committee. DICOM® is a registered trademark of the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA). The DICOM Standard is copyright owned by NEMA. Users should obtain the official current standard from dicomstandard.org. This project does not provide official DICOM conformance certification.

Project code license

The repository’s original source code is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

That license does not apply to:

the DICOM Standard;
official XML, PDF, HTML, CHTML, or target-database artifacts;
third-party terminology referenced by the standard;
a user’s rights or obligations for locally generated content derived from those sources.

Review the source repository’s LICENSE, NOTICE, and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for the selected release.

Local-build rule

Users obtain official artifacts and build the knowledge base locally. Repository, package, container, and documentation releases must not contain:

official DICOM source artifacts;
a generated full SQLite or other knowledge-base database;
generated full-standard JSON;
a generated full-text or vector index;
a bulk text mirror;
a standalone PS3.16 terminology database;
bulk context-group, coded-concept, or code-meaning exports.

This applies even when the generating code is Apache-2.0.

Appropriate project distributions

Subject to the repository’s normal release review, project distributions can contain original project material such as:

source code;
schemas and migrations;
documentation;
tests;
small synthetic fixtures authored for the project;
narrowly scoped attributed fixtures where permitted;
source tarballs and wheels containing code only;
container images containing code and dependencies only;
parser test reports and schema-version metadata.

Users then mount or configure local data and run acquisition/build commands.

Query output

Normal query output is designed around structured facts, official references, and bounded excerpts. A small response used in development documentation is different from publishing a bulk reconstruction of the standard.

When sharing output:

retain the concrete edition and references;
keep excerpts short and necessary;
avoid aggregating responses into a substitute standard database;
preserve third-party terminology attribution and restrictions;
do not imply the project is the official source.

PS3.16 content

SR templates, context groups, and coded concepts can be parsed into a local knowledge base for citation-preserving lookup.

Do not redistribute a generated standalone terminology dump or bulk export of those rows.

Conformance boundary

The project can help developers inspect requirements, build validators, and trace implementation decisions. It does not:

define the DICOM Standard;
provide official interpretations;
prescribe a complete conformance-testing procedure;
certify a product, dataset, or service as DICOM conformant.

A verified local build establishes source provenance, not product certification.

Documentation licensing

The documentation website’s prose, code examples, site code, and project marks have their own reuse boundaries. See Licensing and attribution.

For a redistribution scenario not clearly covered by the project files, obtain appropriate legal review rather than treating this page as permission.