The Cyber Dictionary and Database Library

The Dictionary defines 1,020 technology and cybersecurity terms across 15 domains, each in a sentence or two. It is written for the moment you actually looked the term up — mid-sentence in a meeting, mid-paragraph in a standard — rather than for someone reading the field from the beginning.

The Database Library catalogues 105 open data sources and open-source technologies across 11 shelves, from satellite imagery to conflict and rights data. Each card says what the source holds, how to connect a program to it, and what it costs. 103 of the 105 are free at the tier described.

The two answer the two halves of the same question. The Dictionary tells you what the thing is called; the Database Library tells you where to get it.

Definitions are written to be read cold, by someone who does not yet have the surrounding vocabulary. That is a deliberate constraint and it costs precision: where a term has a formal standards definition, the entry gives the working one instead, and says what the term is for rather than exactly what it denotes. Anyone who needs the normative wording should go to the standard; anyone who needs to follow the conversation should start here.

Each entry carries the domain it belongs to, which answers the second question a reader usually has: not only what the term means, but which part of the field is talking. Where a term is normally met as an abbreviation, the expansion follows the headword; where it is normally met expanded, the abbreviation does.

A note on currency. Definitions age slowly; endpoints, licences and free tiers age fast. The live edition is the authority on the Database Library. Treat a cost line in the printed edition as a description of what the source offered when it was compiled, not as a promise about today.

The printed edition is typeset from the same two files the live tool serves, so the two cannot drift apart in wording. The Dictionary is set in two justified columns with a letter band travelling through the text, the way a dictionary has always been set; the Library is set as catalogue cards, shelf by shelf. Turn the pages in the reader, or take the PDF.