FIAS Open Registry of Specifications and Conventions

The FIAS Open Registry provides a public, versioned, and citable record of research specifications, conventions, nomenclatures, classification schemes, encoding systems, data profiles, protocols, and reference lists.

Submit a specification Browse registered records

What may be submitted

An individual, research group, or organisation may submit:

  • a specification containing explicit normative rules;
  • a convention used in research or scholarly publishing;
  • a profile that selects or constrains an external standard;
  • a writing, transliteration, encoding, or notation system;
  • a nomenclature, controlled vocabulary, classification, or taxonomy;
  • an identifier, citation, data-model, or interchange scheme;
  • a reproducible procedure or protocol;
  • a curated reference list with explicit entry and change rules; or
  • an experimental proposal sufficiently precise for independent examination.

A submission may document an established disciplinary practice, adapt an existing standard, reconcile several systems, or introduce a new proposal.

What registration means

Registration follows documentary and technical review. A registered record has been found sufficiently identified, delimited, documented, and internally consistent to be examined and, where applicable, independently implemented.

Review may cover provenance, scope, references, rights, definitions, normative requirements, versioning, conformance criteria, examples, and evidence of use.

Registration does not mean that FIAS created the specification, that it is mandatory outside its stated scope, that competing conventions are invalid, or that FIAS has certified every underlying scientific or theological claim. Disciplinary review and documented adoption are recorded separately.

Independent status dimensions

Each record distinguishes:

  1. document maturity — draft, stable, superseded, or withdrawn;
  2. Registry review — documentary, technical, and optional domain review;
  3. registration state — submitted, under review, accepted, declined, or registered; and
  4. documented use — no known implementation or a list of identified implementations.

“Accepted for registration” therefore means that the specification passed the stated Registry procedure. It is not a claim of universal scientific authority.

Submission and private tracking

No account and no email address are required. After submitting, the applicant receives:

  • a human-readable submission number; and
  • a private tracking URL containing a long random secret.

The private page reproduces the submitted answers and shows the current status, the date of each decision, and any public reviewer comment. Anyone who possesses the link can read the submission, so the applicant must store it securely.

The Registry does not send email notifications. Applicants return to the private URL whenever they wish to check whether the record is under review, requires a revision, has been accepted, or has been declined.

Review path

  1. Submission received.
  2. Admissibility review.
  3. Documentary review.
  4. Technical review.
  5. Optional domain review.
  6. Revision requested, accepted for registration, or declined.
  7. Registration and publication of a fixed version.

Obvious spam, incomplete material, unlawful material, or content outside the Registry’s scope may be rejected without a public review record. A substantively reviewed proposal may retain a decision record even when registration is declined.

Versions and generated documents

Every registered concept has one stable Registry identifier. Each substantive revision is a separately preserved version linked to the version it supersedes. Published versions are not silently overwritten.

The authoritative source is the structured submission record. From it, the Registry may generate:

  • an HTML record;
  • a formatted PDF specification;
  • a machine-readable JSON record;
  • a SHA-256 integrity value; and
  • a Jekyll page for publication in the public registry.

External archival deposits and persistent identifiers may be added later. They are not required for submission or registration.

Illustrative records

The Registry is organised by the type of object being made explicit, not by a claim to exercise authority over an entire discipline. Suitable examples include:

  • a scientific Latin representation of Modern Persian;
  • a language-identification profile for a multilingual corpus;
  • a biological record model for accepted taxon names, synonyms, authors, and external identifiers;
  • a controlled vocabulary for morphological characters in a specimen database;
  • a chemical-substance identity profile combining preferred name, formula, InChIKey, and source identifiers;
  • rules for presenting stereochemical descriptors in a multilingual reference work;
  • an identifier scheme linking patristic or hagiographical works to editions and passages;
  • a tradition-attributed vocabulary for the status of councils or doctrines;
  • a historical model of ecclesiastical jurisdictions with parent, territory, and validity dates;
  • a feast-date representation across Julian, Revised Julian, and Gregorian calendars;
  • a historical place-name profile containing endonym, exonym, script, coordinates, and validity interval; or
  • a notation and layout profile for Byzantine musical symbols.

Where classifications differ by date, confession, jurisdiction, school, or scholarly interpretation, those viewpoints must be attributed explicitly rather than collapsed into a single universal assertion.