Here’s the wild thing about it - there are only 200,000 or so definitions! Wonder what’s going on? There’s a difference because we are able to track non-standard forms of each term.
Turns out that the folks who write the Authority Documents we need to comply with think they are Faulkner or Longfellow. They enjoy finding many different ways to say the same thing. Take, for instance, one of the most egregiously renamed terms in our dictionary: external requirement.
Now, an external requirement is any law, contractual obligation, code of connection, service level agreement, or even international agreement that an organization must comply with.
That’s a pretty wide swath of terms. If you want to see all the common controls or citations that use the term, you can see them in the Compliance Dictionary’s hierarchical relationships table here.
And, if you want to check out the various non-standard ways of saying external requirement, the full list is at the same link. Here’s a partial list of those non-standard terms; there are 20 versions to date:
The great part about the Compliance Dictionary is that it is tied to the UCF Mapper software and process. As a result, when one of the Authority Document authors says “follow all requirements of this International Standard” and another says “follow applicable legal and regulatory considerations” the Natural Language Processing Engine will be clued in to say “aha, they mean follow external requirements.”
That’s important, because the Compliance Dictionary is the backbone of the mapping and cross-referencing of hundreds of thousands of Citations from over 1,000 Authority Documents.
You can trust that the Compliance Dictionary will be updated with the new terms it finds. Just remember that it will also include almost as many non-standard forms of existing terms that have already been well defined!