The Assets List is split into two main elements: Vendor info and Asset info, but only Asset info is a necessary element. The minimum requirements for defining a valid asset are its common name, its category, and its ID information.

An asset must express its common name

The common name for a product, service, or artifact is a name that can be used for display purposes on end users' computer screens and in database field names. The reason we need a common name is because some authority documents will have official titles that are almost a hundred characters long. This is too long for representation in a vertically aligned spreadsheet cell. Because the official title sometimes contains reserved characters or words such as and, or, and so on, it cannot be used for some purposes, such as the name of a database field. The common name should be short, succinct, relevant to the product's published name, and must follow strict adherence to database field naming conventions. Such conventions do not allow the use of certain characters. The list of restricted, non-usable characters in the product's common name are as follows:

, + - * / ^ & = ≠ ( ) [ ] \ ; : $ AND OR NOT XOR TRUE FALSE

In addition, the first character in any product's common name cannot be any of the following: space, period, or number.

Lastly, the name should be no longer than 100 characters.

An asset must express the category to which it belongs

This is the general category in which a vendor's product or service falls. At this point there are only certain choices:

• Operating System (includes OS drivers)

• Application (includes application drivers)

• Storage

• Hardware (anything from cards to whole CPUs, network devices, etc.)

• Network

• Power or Air

• Facility (including containers)

As the Network Frontiers team begins to build out product categories, we will work with all vendors to create an additional product category field and standardize the category entry types.

An asset must express its unique ID information

Each auditable asset or artifact, in order to be properly tracked (and allow for changes to the name for QA and other purposes) must be assigned a unique and persistent identifier. The UCF™ team automatically assigns each auditable asset or artifact an ID when it officially enters the system. That ID is never changed nor deleted from the database. If an auditable asset or artifact is later redacted, then the record is marked as such, but not deleted.

And in order for the auditable asset to be listed in the appropriate place within the hierarchy of other auditable assets (in order to follow the rules of taxonomic ontology that we apply to it), it must know the ID of it's entire genealogy as well. And finally, along with the asset's genealogy the UCF team also tracks the asset's appropriate sort order so that any client or vendor displaying the full list of assets will display that list in the same order that the UCF team does.