About DID Finder

An open-source reference for defense Data Item Descriptions

What are DIDs?

Data Item Descriptions (DIDs) are documents used in U.S. defense acquisition that define the format, content, preparation instructions, and delivery requirements for contract data deliverables. When a government contract requires a contractor to deliver a report, plan, specification, or technical manual, a DID tells them exactly what that document must contain.

DIDs are managed by the Defense Standardization Program and are listed in the ASSIST database. They are public documents, but today they only exist as static PDFs — hard to search, impossible to compare, and with no open change process.

What DID Finder does

DID Finder turns those static PDFs into a searchable, version-controlled web resource. Every DID in this database has been converted into a structured JSON format and published openly on GitHub. That means:

• Full-text search across document numbers, titles, and requirement content
• A clean, readable view of every requirement — including nested sub-requirements
• Export to Markdown or PDF for offline use
• Version history for every document via Git
• An open contribution process — anyone can submit corrections or additions

How to contribute

The DID data lives in a separate GitHub repository: gfranistaken/did-data. To add a new DID or correct an existing one, open a pull request there. The schema and contribution instructions are documented in the repository.

The viewer application itself (this site) is open source at gfranistaken/did-finder.

Disclaimer

DID Finder is a community-maintained project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or an official product of the U.S. Department of Defense or any government agency. Always verify content against the authoritative ASSIST database. See the full disclaimer.

Data sourced from public DID documents.