NEXUS

Universal Standards Registry

Null-State External Standards & Universal Registry

Identifier: NS-NEXUS
Version: 1.0
Status: Public Open Registry
Scope: Cross-domain technical standards, specifications, protocols, ontologies, schemas, reference models and related normative or informative documents.

Mission

NEXUS is an independent, open registry and knowledge graph for discovering, identifying, relating, comparing and referencing standards and technical specifications published by independent organizations and communities.

NEXUS does not replace the authorities that publish those standards.

Instead, NEXUS provides a cross-domain reference layer connecting standards that would otherwise exist in separate institutional, technical and academic ecosystems.

What NEXUS Does

NEXUS provides:

1. Persistent identifiers for registry records.

2. Canonical references to external specifications.

3. Version and lifecycle information.

4. Relationships between standards and specifications.

5. Provenance information.

6. Machine-readable records.

7. Cross-standard mappings.

8. Implementation and conformance references.

9. Citation-ready references.

10. Public change history.

What NEXUS Does Not Claim

NEXUS does not claim to:

• replace W3C;

• replace IETF;

• replace ISO or IEC;

• exercise governmental authority;

• issue governmental accreditation;

• grant legal certification;

• declare an external standard invalid;

• represent endorsement by an organization unless that organization explicitly provides such endorsement.

The authority of an external standard remains with the organization or community responsible for that standard.

NEXUS provides an independent reference and interoperability layer around such standards.

Registry Principle

A standard should be discoverable as an identifiable object.

A registry record SHOULD contain:

identifier

title

publisher

publisher type

status

version

publication date

supersedes

superseded by

scope

normative status

canonical source

license

related standards

implementations

evidence

Registry Status

NEXUS distinguishes between:

OFFICIAL

PROPOSED

DRAFT

EXPERIMENTAL

COMMUNITY

INFORMATIVE

HISTORIC

WITHDRAWN

UNKNOWN

The status assigned by NEXUS does not override the publisher's own status terminology.

The original publisher remains the authoritative source for the official status of its own documents.

Reference Authority

NEXUS is a reference authority in the limited sense that it maintains its own public registry records and identifiers.

It is not a governmental authority and does not claim sovereign, regulatory, accreditation, or statutory authority.

Machine Access

Every NEXUS record SHOULD be available in both human-readable and machine-readable forms.

Example:

{

  "id": "NS:NEXUS:W3C:JSON-LD:1.1",

  "title": "JSON-LD 1.1",

  "publisher": "W3C",

  "status": "OFFICIAL",

  "canonical": "https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld11/",

  "registry": "https://www.null-state.dev/nexus"

}

Independence

NEXUS records may reference standards published by governments, international organizations, standards-development organizations, companies, universities, research communities and open-source projects.

The inclusion of a document in NEXUS does not constitute endorsement by its publisher.

Likewise, a NEXUS classification does not alter the legal or normative status assigned by the original publisher.

Core Principle

NEXUS does not seek authority by declaration.

Its credibility is intended to emerge from:

accuracy + provenance + transparency + reproducibility + independent use + public review.

Canonical URL

https://www.null-state.dev/nexus