Reflecting on a year's work

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Most days I put some effort into the Cybersecurity Hyperglossary - checking and correcting things, reconsidering and updating meanings, researching the language, adding new terms and cross-linking. It's an absorbing process requiring deep concentration and focus. For this autist, it's satisfying and fun. I enjoy my work!

Given my interest in metrics, I'm using a few simple statistics to measure my progress.  Here's a snapshot:​

​In the 12 months since submitting the manuscript for the first edition, I have added about 700 entries - 115 abbreviations plus 571 new terms.  571!  That's about eleven a week, roughly 2 new terms per day on average but quite lumpy. I recently invested a week quoting 300 definitions from a business continuity glossary, roughly 5 to 10% of which were new terms.

The word count is increasing at about half the rate. Perhaps that's because I'm more succinct and focused now, plus many added terms are either newly coined in the field or are new to me, so there's less to say at first.  It takes me a while to figure out what they really mean and how they link in with the existing terms.  Talking of which, I've put a lot of effort into checking, updating and adding hyperlinks, particularly internal links from keywords in the definitions to the corresponding entries in the hyperglossary. A Word macro helped me find broken links and I am systematically hunting for unlinked keywords to link, increasing the number of links by a quarter in the year. 

Yesterday, I started systematically identifying the added terms, starting with the 'A' chapter.  These are the newly-added A-terms so far:

• Acceptable downtime

• Acceptable risk

• Account discovery

• Account harvesting

• Activation

• Active attack

• Advanced in AI Audit (AAIA)

• Agenda

• AI Bill Of Materials (AIBOM)

• AI Risk Management Framework (AIRMF)

• AI in The Middle (AiTM)

• AIsuru

• Algorithmic bias

• Alias

• Allege, allegedly

• Altamides

• Antithesis

• Application management

• Application recovery#86C6E5

• AI aging

• AI/LLM

• AI/LLM signature

• AI model

• AI Bill Of Materials (AIBOM)

• Audit client

• Audit conclusion

• Audit criteria

• Automated monitoring

• Automatic Call Distribution  

A​ third of them are AI-related - no surprise given that these are A-terms and AI is the hottest of hot topics in cybersecurity at the moment.  I'm finding it fascinating though hard to keep up with the blistering pace of AI development and innovation, currently, but this situation neatly illustrates the value of a good glossary: professional peers are on the same journey of discovery, so I'm hoping the new definitions will provide waypoints and signposts, gently guiding us all along the same track. 

I'm wondering now what to do with the new terms. While I could simply continue accumulating them in my document in preparation (perhaps) for publication of a second edition*, I quite like the idea of releasing them here for information and to encourage feedback, corrections and amplifications before committing to print.  I'll need to figure out how best to do that within Wix, preferably a straightforward process that doesn't take too much time and effort on top of the content maintenance and various other things on my plate at the moment. Being an infosec pro, I'm also keen to avoid losing control of my intellectual property - a tricky balance of risk and reward.

If I continue identifying the additional terms day-by-day, letter-by-letter, I should complete the alphabetic list by the end of May. That gives me time to plan the next steps. 

Meanwhile, do you have any suggestions?  Please let me know (Gary@isect.com)

*The first edition has only been out for two months so far, and I can't tell, yet, how well it is doing in the marketplace until the first set of sales figures come in from the publisher. In addition, I'm waiting anxiously for reviews and comments from readers, good or bad, to decide whether and how to proceed. Does the Cybersecurity Hyperglossary live up to expectations? Is it even worth continuing this effort or should I just call it a day and go fishing?