Reference
Glossary
The terms Regixo uses, in plain English. The compliance words carry legal meaning; where a term maps to a specific GDPR or DORA article, the entry says which — so the engineer and the compliance team read the same page.
GDPR & the record
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| RoPA | Record of Processing Activities — the register defined by GDPR Article 30: how your organisation uses personal data, activity by activity. Regixo auto-drafts it from your real schema. |
| Activity | One entry in the RoPA — your tables grouped by the job they serve (for example “Manage customer accounts”). Regixo groups them from the map automatically; a person confirms the grouping and makes the legal calls. |
| Uncategorised processing | The honest label Regixo gives an activity it grouped but could not confidently name. The tables were grouped automatically, so a person confirms they belong together and states the purpose — never a guess dressed up as an answer. |
| Controller | The organisation that decides why and how personal data is used. Under GDPR it owns the RoPA and the legal calls in it. |
| Processor | A party that only acts on the controller’s behalf (e.g. a payment provider). It processes, but does not decide the purpose. |
| GDPR Article 6 | The six lawful bases for using ordinary personal data: (a) consent, (b) contract, (c) legal obligation, (d) vital interests, (e) public task, (f) legitimate interests. Every activity needs one. |
| GDPR Article 9 | The rules for special-category data (health, ethnicity, religion, biometrics, sexual orientation, trade-union membership). Using it needs a separate Art. 9 ground on top of the Art. 6 basis. |
| GDPR Article 10 | The rules for criminal-offence data (convictions and offences). A separate class from Art. 9, with its own condition. |
| Lawful basis | The Art. 6(1) ground that justifies an activity. A legal judgment — Regixo suggests one from the data signals; a named human confirms it. |
| Special category | The Art. 9 data classes above — the most sensitive personal data, handled under stricter rules. Shown on the map as its own count and filter. |
| Criminal-offence data | Data about convictions and offences, governed by Art. 10. Never treated as an Art. 9 ground. |
| PII / personal data | Data about a person — names, emails, ids — the information GDPR protects. Regixo flags the columns that look like personal data, from their names and types — it never reads the values inside. |
DORA
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| DORA | Digital Operational Resilience Act — EU rules for financial entities. It requires a register of the ICT third-party providers a firm depends on. |
| Register of Information | The DORA register itself — 15 tables covering the entity, its contracts, ICT providers and the functions they support. Regixo part-fills two of the 15 from the map — the ICT providers it can trace to your sources, and the service assessment for each. The other 13 are contract, entity and business facts you enter. |
| LEI | Legal Entity Identifier — a 20-character global company id (ISO 17442): 18 alphanumeric characters plus 2 check digits, validated with mod-97. Identifies each provider in the DORA register. |
Data & the catalog
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Dataset | One table of data (for example your customers table). VIEWs are catalogued as datasets too. |
| Column | A field in a dataset (for example name, email, created_at). The classifier flags a column that looks like personal data from its name and type — never from the values inside. |
| Metadata | Data about your data — names, types, owners — not the real values inside. Regixo reads only this. |
| Lineage | A recorded data flow from one dataset to another (e.g. Stripe → your users table). Regixo reads it from the warehouse catalog or dbt, or you assert it by hand. |
| connectionRef | The one field in regixo.yml that names a source’s secret — it holds the name of an environment variable, never the connection string itself. |
BYOC / the script connector | Bring your own connector — for a source Regixo doesn’t ship. regixo connectors new <name> scaffolds a small generator script; regixo add script --generator <path> --ref <ENV> wires it in. Regixo runs the script as a subprocess on each scan and ingests schema only — names and types, never row values. |
Regixo concepts
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| DRAFT | An unsigned record, watermarked DRAFT. It is complete and usable, but not yet attested. The whole free build produces drafts. |
| OFFICIAL | A record a named person has signed and Regixo has sealed. The DRAFT watermark is gone and an attestation stands behind it. The paid step. |
| Seal / attestation | The cryptographic proof attached when a record is signed: a signature over the exact record bytes plus who signed and when. In eIDAS terms a simple electronic signature — offline-verifiable, portable, no Regixo server needed. |
| Evidence bundle | One machine-readable JSON of your drafts — the RoPA, the DORA register when in scope, the change-log and the source list — each part fingerprinted with sha256. Free and DRAFT-only (regixo evidence); it attests nothing — the signed, official bundle is the paid layer. |
| MCP | Model Context Protocol — how an AI assistant reads your catalog. regixo mcp exposes eight read-only tools over stdio; nothing leaves your machine. |
| Claim / claim link | The opaque link regixo invite produces. It is the credential: anyone holding it can read the drafted record in the portal, but only the address you invited can become its admin — unless you sent it with --unbound, where anyone holding it can. |
| Machine token / paired machine | An ingest-only token (rgx_sync_*) an admin generates on the claim page under “Connect a machine” to let a paired machine push refreshed metadata. Shown once; it can never unlock or sign. It is how an automated re-scan reaches the portal. |
| Licence key | What a paying customer holds to unlock the signed, OFFICIAL record (REGIXO_LICENCE_KEY, rgx_live_*). Not the machine token — the two are never interchangeable, and pasting one where the other is asked for is refused. (REGIXO_LICENCE_KEY_FILE is a different thing again: the vendor’s private signing key, never a customer’s.) |
| Ingest token | Set on a portal you run yourself (REGIXO_INGEST_TOKEN) to require a credential before it will accept an uploaded draft. A portal-operator setting: an engineer forwarding a record only needs one when the portal’s operator has configured it, and the refusal names it. |
| Briefing | The file regixo share writes — a briefing for your compliance team: what looks like personal data, where it lives, with the full map underneath as evidence. Metadata only; it opens in any browser and reaches nothing when opened. |
| Your part | The three facts on the record only the engineering side knows — how the data is protected, which outside services get a copy, and whose data it is. Answered on the free Record page; distinct from the legal calls the compliance team makes. |
| Re-sign | When a core RoPA field (purpose, lawful basis, retention, data categories, data subjects, recipients, transfers) changes on an already-signed activity, Regixo flags it for a human to sign again. It never re-signs for you. |
| Staleness | The per-source age of the last scan. The portal warns at 30 days and gets loud at 90 — thresholds configurable in regixo.yml — and the map carries a banner when a source is overdue. |
| Provenance | The machine-readable trust signal for the catalog: per-source reachability, staleness, the classifier method used, and the seal status (draft vs official). Read it with regixo status or the get_provenance agent tool. |
Terms in the CLI too
regixo help prints a short plain-English glossary at its foot, and
regixo help --json carries the same list for an agent.Your next step
Now the words are clear, the last reference answers the question a compliance reader asks first — what
can leave your machine, and what is built today: Data handling &
what’s built →.