Research, academia and education: conformance

An implementation conforms to NS-0 when it:

• names the canonical repository and the versions of the standards it applies;
• does not fork a registry;
• runs the repository validator, or an equivalent, on the copies of the registries it uses;
• records its implementation status per standard in registry/consumers.yaml truthfully; and
• carries the honesty fields (legalState, claimCeiling, status) on every record it publishes.

Conformance to NS-0 is a statement by the implementation, verifiable under NS-11. It is not a certification by the Secretariat or by the Global Standards Council.

One attestation is recorded per clause, per subject, per evaluation (AT category, append-only). Results: PASS; FAIL; INDETERMINATE (evidence missing or unresolvable); NOT_APPLICABLE (the subject was outside the clause’s selectors at that instant); REFUSED (the evaluator lacked a mandate or the evidence was not accessible; the refusal is itself recorded). An attestation carries a canonical digest and, optionally, a signature; certifiesTruth is always false. A later attestation supersedes an earlier one for the same clause and subject, and the history is kept.

Crosswalks: an attestation can be exported as a W3C Verifiable Credential under the Verifiable Credentials Data Model 2.0 (subject: the contextual UNI; issuer: the evaluator; evidence: the refs), as an in-toto attestation (for software subjects) or as a PROV-O activity (NS-3b). The Nexus attestation remains the key and the record of truth.

Monitoring is continuous evaluation together with observation records. For each bound policy and context, the monitoring service records (a) the latest attestation per clause, (b) coverage (which clauses have no current attestation, and why), (c) drift (a change in a subject’s records that invalidates an attestation) and (d) the availability of evaluators and evidence sources. Monitoring records are observations with record UNIs. Dashboards and panels are projections of them and show the timestamp and the evaluator for every value; no verdict is stored.

A conformance report for a context is generated, not written: policy by policy and clause by clause, with attestation UNIs, evidence refs, conformance levels (NS-10 section 3) and the honesty fields. Reports are catalogued artefacts (RP) and may be published (NS-8) only when their legalState allows. A report does not say "certified" or "compliant" except when it quotes an authority decision by reference.

A context (NS-9) or artefact claims a relation to an external standard only through a clause set (NS-10) that cites that standard and is evaluated (NS-11). The claim is displayed as "implements clauses derived from <standard> (n of m with a current PASS)", with attestation UNIs. It is never displayed as "compliant with" or "certified to" unless a decision of the body entitled to say so is referenced. Where a body operates its own certification, conformance under the Nexus Standards is explicitly not that certification.