Registry

The registry catalogs the cornerstones of the ontology lifecycle ecosystem — the institutions, standards, methodologies, and foundational publications that have become stakes in the ground through decades of prior research, and that Crosswalker’s architecture has to either adopt, bridge to, or consciously reject.

What earns an entry here: an entity, spec, methodology, or publication that the KB cites in multiple places, that represents a convergence point in the literature (where independent projects arrived at the same answer), or that a Foundation-phase decision depends on. Not every technical term belongs here — only the ones that matter enough to lock in canonical facts so future research agents don’t re-derive them. When the 04-10 research sessions kept surfacing things like SSSOM, STRM, and NIST IR 8477 as repeated touchstones, it became worth giving each its own page.

A note on what goes where — and the meta-joke embedded in that question

This registry holds both organizations and technical specs, methodologies, and publications, because — somewhat on the nose for a tool built to solve ontology problems — entities in this space resist clean categorization:

• STRM is both a methodology and an SCF work product
• OSCAL is both a spec and a NIST project
• NIST IR 8477 is both a publication and the formalization of a methodology SCF already used
• OLIR is both an org-level program and a crosswalk registry artifact

Rather than fighting this by forcing every entry into a single hierarchy slot, we put related things next to each other under descriptive prose headings and let entries cross-link freely. This is the same lesson the Ranganathan / faceted classification section of the 04-10 synthesis calls out: facets over rigid trees is the resilient pattern, and we’re applying it to our own KB structure here.

This registry will grow into the community marketplace for framework configs — each entity page will eventually link to available FrameworkConfig presets and evolution profiles.

Standard bodies

• NIST — 800-53, CSF, OSCAL, RMF, OLIR program
• MITRE — ATT&CK, D3FEND, ENGAGE, CTID
• ISO — 27001, 27002, 31000
• CIS — Controls v8, Benchmarks

Mapping organizations

• SCF — 175+ framework hub via STRM (the interlingua / synthetic spine)
• OLIR — NIST’s submission-based crosswalk registry
• CTID — ATT&CK ↔ 800-53 mappings (MITRE Engenuity)

Industry groups

• CRI — CRI Profile for financial sector
• OWASP — Top 10, SAMM, ASVS (application security)

Regulators

• FFIEC — US financial institution examinations
• SEC — US securities cyber disclosure

Specs, formats & data models

Machine-readable formats and data models that serialize framework content.

• OSCAL — Machine-readable security controls format (NIST)

Mapping methodologies & edge vocabularies

Named methodologies and vocabularies for describing how things map to each other — the “edge semantics” layer that sits above any particular framework. This is where the 04-10 synthesis found most of its cornerstones.

• SKOS — Simple Knowledge Organization System. The W3C mapping relations (exactMatch, closeMatch, broadMatch, narrowMatch, relatedMatch) that the research found insufficient for compliance — but that every later mapping standard builds from.
• SSSOM — Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings. The mature metadata model for mapping provenance, confidence, authorship, and negation. (Candidate edge metadata model for Crosswalker crosswalks.)
• STRM — Set Theory Relationship Mapping. SCF’s methodology, formalized independently in NIST IR 8477 and adopted by OSCAL’s Control Mapping Model. The 5-relationship vocabulary (equivalent, subset, superset, intersects, no-relationship) that the 04-10 synthesis identifies as the convergence point for crosswalk edge types.

Foundational publications

Specific documents that lock in methodologies or definitions the problem domain has converged on.

• NIST IR 8477 (coming) — Mapping Relationships Between Documentary Standards (February 2024). The formal NIST publication that defines the 5 set-theory relationships used in STRM, SCF, and OSCAL’s Control Mapping Model.

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See also: Institutional landscape · Operational landscape · Framework standards & tools · Terminology