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Welcome to the Eco Rules Catalog.

This project is a SITM-owned standard for identifying, describing, and organizing software inefficiency.

If you are new to the catalog, this is the shortest path to understanding it.

What this is

The Eco Rules Catalog provides:

• a shared language for software waste
• a canonical rule format
• controlled vocabulary through the registry
• validation and reproducibility
• a foundation for tooling, education, and certification

In plain English: it helps teams name waste, find waste, and fix waste more consistently.

Because waste is a bug.

What to read first

1. Standard
   The governing document for the catalog.

2. Ontology Overview
   Explains how rules are classified and described.

3. Taxonomy
   Shows the canonical vocabulary used by the catalog.

4. Human Catalog
   Browse the actual rules.

5. Contributing
   How to propose changes safely and cleanly.

How the system is organized

Machine-readable source of truth

• catalog/registry.json
• catalog/schema/schema-rule.json
• catalog/schema/schema-registry.json
• catalog/rules/...

Generated artifacts

• catalog/master.json
• generated human-readable catalog pages

Public documentation

• docs/...

The basic model

A rule describes a known inefficiency pattern.

A rule should answer:

• what is happening
• why it matters
• where it appears
• how it can be detected
• how it can be remediated

Every rule has:

• a canonical ID
• a category and family
• a primary layer
• ontology.system_layers
• impact, detection, remediation, and metadata

Current canonical layers

• ai
• architecture
• code
• data
• network
• process

These values come from the registry and should be treated as canonical.

What to use as the source of truth

If documents ever disagree:

• trust catalog/registry.json for controlled values
• trust catalog/schema/... for structure
• trust catalog/rules/... as the source of truth for individual rules
• treat catalog/master.json as generated

What this enables

This catalog is meant to support:

• rule browsing
• validation
• tool integration
• reporting
• education
• certification alignment
• future benchmarking

Suggested next steps

If you are:

A contributor

Read: - Contributing - Rule Checklist - Ontology Checklist

A tool builder

Read: - Standard - Ontology Model - the registry and schemas in catalog/

A reader

Start with: - Human Catalog - Releases

Final note

The Eco Rules Catalog is not just a repository of patterns.

It is an effort to make software waste visible, discussable, and actionable.

That is the point.

Because waste is a bug.