Applications Inventory and Attributes - Glossary of Terms and Phrases

Applications Inventory and Attributes

Chapter 2. Glossary of Terms and Phrases

Authored and Published By: The International Foundation for Information Technology (IF4IT), LLC

The following terms are used throughout this document with specific meanings. Terms defined in the IF4IT Enterprise Inventory Management Best Practices document or in discipline-specific Best Practices documents (APM, TPM, etc.) are not duplicated here — refer to those documents for broader inventory governance and discipline-specific vocabulary.

Term	Definition
Application	A discrete software solution used to support one or more business capabilities or user functions. An application has a name, an owner, a purpose, and a cost. It is distinct from a System (a broader collection of applications and infrastructure components), a Platform (a foundational technology layer on which applications are built), and a Service (a defined capability delivered to users, which may be enabled by one or more applications).
Application Technology Profile	The multi-value attribute capturing the set of core technologies an application is built on or depends on. Each value in the set references or seeds a record in the Technologies Inventory. One of the two primary sources for seeding the Technologies Inventory — the other is the Transport Technology attribute of Integration records.
Calculated Attribute	An attribute whose value is computed from other attributes within the same inventory record or aggregated from records in the same or another inventory. Calculated attributes are system-populated and should never have a manual data entry field. Example: Total Integration Count, Application Utilization Rate, Composite Risk Score.
Catalog	A discovery and exposure construct built over an Inventory/Registry that surfaces registered Noun Instances and their associated data, content, and services at both the catalog level and the individual instance level. Serves as a knowledge management user interface into the Enterprise Model — letting a person find, learn about, and engage with instances, browse and filter them by their governed attribute values, and traverse their relationships to related Noun Instances.
Catalog of Catalogs	The enterprise-wide federated discovery surface spanning every Noun Type Catalog, exposing registered instances and their associated data, content, and services across the Enterprise Model. The discovery-layer counterpart to the Inventory of Inventories.
Crawl	The first maturity stage of the Crawl-Walk-Run APM maturity model. At Crawl maturity, an organization collects the minimum viable set of attributes needed to establish a functional inventory and begin basic governance. Crawl-tagged attributes should be collected in the first inventory pass.
Data Residency	The physical or geographic location(s) where an application’s data is stored. Governed in the Geographic and Jurisdictional attributes and evaluated against location requirements for compliance, disaster recovery, and cloud-placement decisions.
Data Sovereignty	The legal jurisdiction(s) whose laws and regulations govern an application’s data by virtue of where that data resides or whose residents it concerns. Distinct from data residency, which is a physical location; sovereignty is the governing legal authority. Governed in the Geographic and Jurisdictional attributes.
Derived Attribute	An attribute whose value is inferred or reverse-engineered from records in another inventory through a defined relationship. Derived attributes are system-populated from the relationship graph and should never have a manual data entry field. Example: End-of-Life Risk Rating (derived from End-of-Life Status), Key Upstream Entity Dependencies (derived from Integrations Inventory records).
Integration Summary	The twelfth attribute category of the Applications Inventory, containing only calculated and derived attributes that summarize the application’s integration profile — total count, directional counts, criticality rating, and key dependencies. All values in this category are system-populated from the Integrations Inventory. No manual data entry is required or appropriate for any attribute in this category.
IT Operating Environment	A governed environment in which an application is deployed and runs — for example, development, test, staging, production, or disaster recovery. Governed as its own Noun Type in the Environments Inventory; the Applications Inventory relates each application to the IT Operating Environments it runs in through the Related IT Operating Environments attribute.
Manually Entered	An attribute whose value is populated directly by a human practitioner — the IT Application Owner, Business Owner, or designated governance function. The governance obligation for accuracy and currency rests with the named owner of the application record.
Multi-Value Attribute	An attribute that holds an unordered set of values simultaneously rather than a single value. Indicated in the Attribute Name column by the notation [Multi-Value] below the attribute name. Examples: Technology Profile (an application may use multiple technologies), Regulatory Frameworks Applicable (an application may be subject to multiple frameworks), Related IT Operating Environments (an application may run in multiple governed environments simultaneously).
Registry	A governed, authoritative collection in which every instance of a Noun Type is formally registered, either manually or through automation. Equivalent to a Noun Inventory — the two terms name the same construct.
Run	The third maturity stage of the Crawl-Walk-Run APM maturity model. At Run maturity, an organization collects the advanced attributes that enable predictive analysis, AI-assisted portfolio intelligence, composite scoring, and cross-inventory derivation. Run-tagged attributes are collected as the governance program matures.
Semantic Identifier	A unique, human-readable, self-documenting identifier assigned to every application record following a consistent enterprise naming convention. For the Applications Inventory, the convention is APP-{Category}-{Name}. Example: APP-CRM-SALESFORCE. The Semantic Identifier is permanent and enables AI-assisted cross-inventory traversal without ETL transformation.
Subject Matter Expert (SME)	A person recognized as an authoritative source of knowledge about a specific application — how it works, what it supports, and how it is operated and governed. Modeled as a role-typed relationship from the application to one or more Person instances and governed in the Ownership and Stakeholder attributes.
Walk	The second maturity stage of the Crawl-Walk-Run APM maturity model. At Walk maturity, an organization adds the governance rigor needed for assessment, rationalization, financial analysis, and compliance governance. Walk-tagged attributes are collected after the Crawl foundation is established and the governance operating model is functioning.

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