As noted in previous section, every artifact can be uniquely identified by its file path. However this is not always the preferred way of artifact identification.

Modern Java build systems provide a way of identifying artifacts with an abstract identifier, or more often a pair of identifiers. The first if usually called group ID or organization ID while the second is just artifact ID. This pair of identifiers will be called artifact coordinates in this document. Besides group ID and artifact ID, artifact coordinates may also include other (optional) information about artifact, such as extension, classifier or version.

In Linux distributions it’s important to stay close to upstreams providing software being packaged, so the ability to identify artifacts in the same way as upstream does is very important from the point of view of packaging. Every artifact can optionally be identified by artifact coordinates assigned during package build. Packages built with Maven automatically use this feature, but all other packages, even these built with pure javac, can use this feature too (see description of %mvn_artifact and %add_maven_depmap macros).