GitHub Topics for Team Identification

Shoehorn can automatically identify team ownership of repositories using GitHub topics. This provides a zero-configuration way to establish ownership without requiring manual manifest files.

How It Works

Add an ownership topic to your GitHub repository
Shoehorn’s crawler discovers the topic during repository scanning
The repository is automatically assigned to the matching team

Topic Convention

Shoehorn supports both owner and team topic prefixes:

Pattern	Example	Behavior
`owner-<team-slug>`	`owner-platform-team`	Explicit ownership topic
`owner:<team-slug>`	`owner:platform-team`	Also supported
`team-<team-slug>`	`team-beta-team`	Team ownership topic
`team:<team-slug>`	`team:beta-team`	Also supported

Recommended for new repositories:

Use owner-<team-slug> when the topic is your primary ownership declaration.
Use team-<team-slug> when you want a lighter convention that still maps cleanly.

Setting Topics on GitHub

Go to your repository on GitHub
Click the gear icon next to About
In the Topics field, add your team topic
Click Save changes

Or via the GitHub API:

curl -X PUT https://api.github.com/repos/<owner>/<repo>/topics \
  -H "Authorization: token <github-token>" \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
  -d '{"names": ["owner-platform-team", "golang", "microservice"]}'

Scorecard Integration

The scorecard rule team-topic checks if a repository has an ownership topic assigned. This contributes to the ownership category score.

Priority

GitHub topics have lower priority than direct ownership annotations:

Manifest owner field (highest)
Kubernetes annotation shoehorn.dev/owner
GitHub topic owner-* / owner:* / team-* / team:* (lowest)

If a manifest explicitly sets an owner, the GitHub topic is ignored for ownership purposes but still tracked as metadata.

Multiple Topics

A repository can have multiple topics. Only topics matching the ownership patterns above are used for ownership. All other topics are treated as regular tags and imported into the entity’s tag list.