hosted/IF_NAMING_BIBLE_v1.0.md

InfraFabric Naming Bible (v1.0)

Date: 2025-12-22
Author: Danny Stocker
Status: Canonical reference (refactor-in-progress)

Core principle

Governance infrastructure must be comprehensible to the governed.

Names in InfraFabric are chosen to be legible to non-specialists (think: secondary-school educated — nurses, farmers, receptionists, students), not only domain experts.

Academic terminology is allowed, but it is subordinate: first mention only, in parentheses.

The two-tier naming system

Tier 1: Layer names (literal)

Layer names are professional, literal domain descriptors.

• Say what it is
• No branding energy
• “Boring” is good

Examples:

• IF.GOV (governance)
• IF.SECURITY (security) — alias: IF.SEC
• IF.TRANSIT (transport/transit)
• IF.AUDIT (audit)

Tier 2: Component names (metaphorical)

Component names use short metaphors that make the function obvious.

• Short and punchy (1–2 syllables preferred)
• Concrete mental image
• Cross-cultural where possible

Metaphor selection strategy

Don’t force a single metaphor domain. Use what makes each function clearest.

Available domains (examples):

• Medical/Emergency: TRIAGE, QUARANTINE
• Legal/Civic: PANEL, WITNESS
• Physical/Security: DETECT, TRAP
• Logistics/Travel: HUB, TRANSIT
• Investigation: TRAIL, PROOF

Canonical hierarchy (current refactor target)

IF.GOV.* (governance)

• IF.GOV.TRIAGE (controversy-weighted risk stratification)
• IF.GOV.PANEL (multi-agent oversight with structural dissent requirements)
• IF.GOV.PANEL.EXTENDED (extended multi-agent oversight panel)
• IF.GOV.QUESTIONS (provenance interrogative framework)
• IF.GOV.WITNESS (audit observation and compliance monitoring)

IF.SECURITY.* (security)

• IF.SECURITY.DETECT (context-aware secret detection)
• IF.SECURITY.CHECK (epistemic anomaly detection and coherence validation)
• IF.SECURITY.WATCH (threat intelligence and monitoring)
• IF.SECURITY.TRAP (honeypot deployment and active defense)

IF.TRANSIT.* (transport)

• IF.TRANSIT.HUB (privilege-enforced kinetic message router)
• IF.TRANSIT.MESSAGE (cryptographically signed message protocol)
• IF.TRANSIT.SWARM (distributed agent coordination)

IF.AUDIT.* (audit)

• IF.AUDIT.TRAIL (immutable chain-of-custody logging)
• IF.AUDIT.PROOF (portable verification bundle with replay capability)

Special cases

• IF.TTT stays as a mnemonic triad (Traceable / Transparent / Trustworthy). It is a philosophy and compliance spine. Concrete artifacts should be named under IF.AUDIT.*.
• IF.STORY stays as-is (product name: narrative logging).
• IF.EMOTION stays as-is (application name: exemplar product).

Academic translation format

First mention only:

IF.GOV.PANEL (multi-agent oversight with structural dissent requirements)

Avoid:

• aka, |, or “formerly” in the main prose

Deprecated aliases are intentionally omitted from reviewer-facing docs to avoid lexicon drift. Use canonical names consistently.

Testing heuristics

The “youth hostel test”

Could a non-technical person read an audit trail and understand what happened?

Example pass:

“Your request went to TRIAGE, which escalated to PANEL. DETECT found a secret. The decision is recorded in AUDIT.TRAIL.”

The “government separation-of-duties” sanity check

If in doubt, follow separation-of-duties patterns inspired by US/CA/EU governance structures:

• separate triage (classification) from deliberation (decision)
• separate detection (security) from actuation (transport)
• separate recordkeeping (audit) from narrative (story)

Canonical registry

• Machine-readable registry: IF_NAMING_REGISTRY.yaml
• Component charters (separation-of-duties): gov/