Software Technologies Inventory and Attributes - Glossary of Terms and Phrases

Software Technologies 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	Abbreviations and Acronyms	Definition
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures	CVE	A publicly catalogued, uniquely identified security vulnerability affecting a specific software technology and version range.
End of Life	EOL	The point at which a supplier ceases to develop, sell, or maintain a software technology in any form.
End of Support	EOS	The point at which a supplier ceases to provide fixes, patches, or security updates for a software technology, whether or not it remains installed and running.
Middleware		Software technology whose purpose is to connect other software technologies, applications, or systems, carrying messages, transactions, or data between them.
Open Source Software	OSS	Software technology distributed under a license granting rights to use, inspect, modify, and redistribute its source code, subject to that license’s obligations.
Patch Cadence		The rhythm at which a supplier releases corrective and security updates for a software technology, and the corresponding rhythm at which the enterprise applies them.
Runtime		The software technology that executes code written in a given language or framework, providing the execution environment applications depend on at run time.
Software Bill of Materials	SBOM	A machine-readable record of the components, libraries, and dependencies that constitute a software technology, used to trace exposure when a vulnerability is disclosed.
Software Technologies Catalog		A consumable, self-service view built on top of a mature Software Technologies Inventory, used to discover, request, and reuse approved software technologies. Not a system of record, and not a starting point.
Software Technologies Registry		The Software Technologies Inventory expressed as a registry. The two terms name the same thing: a governed record of which software technologies exist, who owns them, and what they are permitted to do.
Software Technology		One discrete, governable software product that can be procured or obtained, installed, versioned, licensed, operated, and retired. The Noun Instance this inventory governs.
Software Technology Category		The top-level classification of a software technology by the kind of thing it is.
Software Technology Subcategory		The specific classification beneath a category, naming the particular kind of software technology.

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