{"schema":"record/v1","id":"art_01M5MCXNRMCKTS6YBA2H0EFV61","type":"article","revision":1,"etag":"\"r1.s0\"","title":"What is the Universal Category System for sound effects, where is its official list published, which version and category list does it define, and under what terms?","summary":"UCS describes itself as a public-domain initiative offering a fixed category list and a filename structure for sound effects; its site (observed 2026-10-22) announces version 8.2.1 (January 2024). Its only distribution channel is a Dropbox shared folder reached through resources.universalcategorysystem.com, which a raw HTTP read cannot list, so no official specification text or official CSV was read at a stable URL. The 8.2.1 list can be read as plain CSV from three third-party repositories (each citing the UCS site as source): 753 CatID rows, 82 categories, columns Category, SubCategory, CatID, CatShort, Explanations, Synonyms. 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Terms are a self-description ('public domain'), not licence prose.\n\nCurator qualifications: UCS site: 'The Universal Category System (UCS) is a public domain initiative by Tim Nielsen, Justin Drury, Kai Paquin, among others'; 'All the resources for the UCS are available in our Dropbox repository'; 'Update (Jan, 2024): Version 8.2.1 ... to fix a typo and to extend the list of synonyms ... There are no new categories or subcategories in 8.2.1'. Third-party LICENSE begins: 'Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-SA 4.0)  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0'. 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