synapse_cdm — the Canonical Data Model and adapter framework

Twelve integration adapters are shipped: PNTMAP GNSS alerts, TAK / Cursor-on-Target, AIS / NMEA 0183 AIVDM, ADS-B 1090ES extended squitter, Picogrid Legion, ASTERIX category 021, STANAG 4676 / AEDP-12 Edition B NITS tracks, STANAG 4607 / AEDP-4607 Edition A GMTI, ASTERIX category 048 monoradar target reports, ASTERIX category 034 monoradar service messages, ASTERIX category 062 SDPS system track messages, and ASTERIX category 023 CNS/ATM ground station and service status reports. Without a canonical model in the middle, twelve adapters means sixty-six translations and twelve private notions of "a contact". With one, an adapter is a thin translator and nothing else.

Shipped so far:

external format ──▶ Adapter.to_cdm() ──▶ Entity | Event | Track | PlanObject ──▶ platform
platform        ──▶ Adapter.from_cdm() ─▶ external format          (egress, e.g. TAK)

Quick start

Using it. Nothing but the package, from any directory:

pip install synapse-cdm

python -m synapse_cdm.harness --adapter pntmap        # replays the fixtures that came with it
python -m synapse_cdm.schemas --out ./schemas         # writes the six JSON Schemas, anywhere

python -m synapse_cdm.harness --list-adapters         # the names --adapter takes

--fixtures is optional for an adapter this package ships: omitted, the harness asks the import system where its own fixtures are and replays those, wherever the package is installed. Pass it to replay your own set. Both commands also install as cdm-harness and cdm-schemas.

--list-adapters shipped in 1.1.0. It was on main and absent from 1.0.0 for one release, and this paragraph carried that warning; on an installed 1.0.0 the third command above still fails with argparse's unrecognized arguments, which is worth knowing only if that is the version you have. From 1.1.0 the roster is a command rather than a table to trust. See MIGRATIONS.md, "1.1.0".

The wheel deliberately carries no copy of the published schemas — a third copy of a generated artefact is a third thing that can go stale — so python -m synapse_cdm.schemas --out <dir> produces them on demand instead, and they are identical to the ones the repository publishes.

Working on it. From a clone of the repository:

pip install -e "packages/cdm[test]"                   # the package, its two deps, and pytest
pytest -q                                             # the whole suite
python -m synapse_cdm.schemas --check --out schemas   # fail if the published schemas are stale
python gates/wheel_install.py                         # and that the WHEEL is what was tested

pytest.ini puts packages/cdm on the path, so the suite judges the working tree rather than whatever wheel happens to be in the environment. That is deliberate and it has a cost — nothing in the suite exercises the artefact a partner receives — which is what gates/wheel_install.py is for: it builds the distribution, installs it into a clean environment and runs the harness and half the suite against that.

The four canonical objects

Every one of them also carries, from CDMBase:

• schema_version — semver, in every serialised object (see MIGRATIONS.md);
• source — {system, adapter, adapter_version, synthetic}: which translator produced this;
• source_ids[] — the external identifiers the object is known by, at least one;
• object_kind — the discriminator, so a mixed stream can be validated without guessing;
• integrity — the PQC signature block: designed, deliberately not implemented.

One source payload legitimately becomes several objects. A PNTMAP alert is an INTERFERENCE_SOURCE entity and a GNSS_INTERFERENCE event, so to_cdm() returns a list.

The rules, and where each one is enforced

1. Adapters never drop data. A field with no canonical home goes into Entity.attributes or Event.payload, parked under source_extras by lossless.residual(). Enforced: the harness compares every scalar in the source payload against the CDM output and fails the adapter on a value that appears nowhere. Values that legitimately change (a unit conversion, a re-rendered timestamp) are declared in the adapter's TRANSFORMS with a reason, and the harness prints every declaration on every run — an exemption is a visible line in the report, not a silent skip.

2. Adapters are pure translation. No filtering, no enrichment, no thresholds. Each of those is a decision, and a decision made inside a translator is invisible to the audit trail and unattributable. The reference adapter demonstrates the rule where it is most tempting: a GNSS jamming emitter gets affiliation: UNKNOWN unless the payload states an attribution.

3. An unknown position is null, never (0, 0). Structural, not conventional: Position requires lat and lon, so "unknown" cannot be spelled as zeros — it is spelled by the absence of a Position. Note the mirror-image defect: 0.0 is a real coordinate, so if not lat is as wrong as null-to-zero. Both directions have a fixture and a test.

4. An unknown scalar is None, never 0. 0 kt is measured stillness, 0° is due north, confidence 0 is certainty-that-not. A source's "value not available" sentinel (AIS sends 102.3 for unknown speed) is translated, never passed through.

5. Every object states whether it is exercise data. source.synthetic is required and has no default — mislabelling exercise data as live can reach an operational picture, and mislabelling live data as exercise hides it from an operator. Neither direction is safe to guess, so the format makes someone state it.

6. Identity is derived, never drawn. entity_id is uuid5(namespace, system|external_id) (ids.py), so the tenth report about one emitter updates one entity instead of creating a tenth. It also makes golden-output tests possible at all. An adapter with no stable upstream identifier must record what it keyed on (attributes.entity_id_basis).

7. Time has one serialised form. RFC 3339 UTC, exactly three decimals, always Z — the same pattern the Track contract pins, because two timestamps meaning the same instant must compare equal as strings in golden diffs and chain hashes. received_at comes from an injected clock; adapter code never calls datetime.now().

Writing the next adapter

Read adapters/pntmap.py first — every rule above appears in it at least once. Then read adapters/ais.py if your format is binary, packs several fields into one wire value, or spells "unknown" as an in-band number — it has ten such sentinels, one of which (draught 0.0) is also a plausible reading, and it is the one adapter whose egress format has nowhere to park a field it cannot map. Or read adapters/tak.py, which is where the awkward cases live: XML rather than JSON, a bidirectional from_cdm(), a source sentinel that must become null, an enum collapse that has to stay recoverable, and the two fixture forms an XML adapter needs in order to be checked at all.

Read adapters/adsb.py for the case where the format does not give you the value at all. Three of its problems recur in any surveillance feed: a frame with no timestamp, so observed_at is receipt time and has to say so; a position that needs a second message to resolve, which is where the line between translation and fusion gets drawn and where a reference position supplied as configuration is legitimate while a cache is not; and two fields that look like one — a barometric and a GNSS altitude, which must not be collapsed into alt_m however convenient it would be. It is also the adapter whose gate earned its keep most visibly: the byte-exact round trip found two silent data losses that every other check passed.

Then:

1. Declare the class. The contract is checked at class-definition time, so a mistake here fails at import rather than at 03:00 on the first outbound push.

class TakAdapter(Adapter):
    name = "tak"                     # unique; how the harness and every SourceRef name you
    version = "0.1.0"                # semver; goes into source.adapter_version
    direction = "bidirectional"      # then you MUST override from_cdm()
    system = "TAK"

    TRANSFORMS = {"event.@time": "re-rendered into the CDM's fixed-millisecond form"}

    def to_cdm(self, raw: bytes | dict) -> list[CDMBase]:
        ...

2. Map the fields. FORMAT_COVERAGE.md already holds the CoT and STANAG 4676 mappings, row by row, with the six known gaps named — that table is your specification, and a test resolves every path in it against the models so it cannot go stale.

3. Park everything else. List the dotted paths you consumed, hand them to lossless.residual(raw, consumed), and put the result in attributes["source_extras"] / payload["source_extras"]. Do not enumerate leftovers by hand: the block a source adds in its next firmware release is exactly the one nobody remembers.

4. Refuse what you cannot read. A missing required field or an unmappable severity raises. Do not default it — an alert that arrives labelled INFO because its severity was unreadable is worse than one that fails loudly. An enum that has an UNKNOWN member is different: use it, and keep the source's own word in attributes.

5. Ship fixtures. At least three synthetic payloads in this package's fixtures/<name>/, including one that exercises the awkward path (a missing position, an unknown type, a vendor block you have never seen). No real data, ever. If your adapter lives outside this package, put them wherever you like and pass --fixtures — the harness is not fussy about where they are, only about there being some.

6. Record the golden output and read it.

python -m synapse_cdm.harness --adapter tak --update-golden

Then review the diff before committing it — --update-golden is how a defect becomes the expectation. Both defects found while building the reference adapter were caught by reading a golden file, not by a failing test.

7. Add the tests. Copy the shape of tests/test_cdm_pntmap_adapter.py: one test per claim in your adapter's docstring. If you are bidirectional, the harness already round-trips you — declare direction = "bidirectional", override from_cdm(), and the roundtrip column checks that no source value goes missing on the way out. It compares values, not bytes: a byte-equal round trip is neither achievable nor the point (key order changes, omitted optional fields come back explicit, XML attribute order is arbitrary). An adapter emitting XML or USMTF gets SKIP there and must ship its own round-trip test.

The harness

python -m synapse_cdm.harness --adapter <name|module:Class> [--fixtures <dir>] [--json]
                              [--schemas <dir>] [--now <RFC3339>] [--update-golden]
                              [--synthetic true|false]
python -m synapse_cdm.harness --list-adapters [--json]

--list-adapters prints the registry and exits 0: name, version, direction, fixture directory and system. The fixture column is there because stanag4676 replays fixtures/nits and that relation was folklore until Adapter.fixture_dir made it a declaration — folklore that produced a nine-adapter sweep reporting nine greens with one of them vacuous. Before this flag the roster was reachable only by getting something wrong: --adapter typo returns it inside a LookupError, and a bare invocation returns argparse's usage line, which names --adapter and not one value it takes. It shipped in 1.1.0; on 1.0.0 — the one release without it — the roster needed a clone or an editable install.

Six checks per fixture, and an unrun check reports SKIP — never PASS:

Nothing in the harness knows anything about any particular adapter — it resolves module:ClassName as readily as a registered name, which is what makes it usable as the gate for adapters the AI adapter factory generates and this repository has never seen.

Exit codes: 0 every fixture passed, 1 fixtures ran and some failed, 2 the run could not happen — no fixture matched, the --schemas directory held no schemas, or --fixtures was omitted for an adapter this package does not ship. The third one exists because 2 and 1 send a reader to different places — 1 says debug the adapter, 2 says fix the path you passed — and because a run that matched nothing used to exit 0 with 0 passed, 0 failed. It does not any more: an absent directory, an empty one and one whose only content is a spec/ subdirectory are the same failure, and the message names the adapter, the directory searched and the rule that selected nothing. --json prints nothing at all in that case, because the shape of a report is itself a claim that fixtures were judged.

The fixture directory is not always the adapter's name, and you no longer have to know that. stanag4676 reads its fixtures from fixtures/nits — the adapter is named for a covering document and the directory for the bytes it holds — and pointing --fixtures at fixtures/stanag4676 is the invocation that used to pass vacuously, because that directory holds only pinned standards. Each adapter now DECLARES its directory (Adapter.fixture_dir) and the harness resolves it through importlib.resources, so omitting --fixtures is always right for a shipped adapter. tests/test_cdm_harness.py holds the same map written out by hand and requires the two to agree, so a new adapter cannot join the roster without one.

--fixtures is required for module:ClassName, and refused rather than guessed at. This package ships fixtures for the adapters IT ships; guessing at fixtures/<your name> would either miss — a failure naming a directory you never mentioned — or HIT, because your adapter's name collided with one of ours, and then your code is judged against our payloads and every check passes or fails for reasons that have nothing to do with it.

Three things the harness cannot check for you

Adapter #11 mutation-checked its own assertions and each mutation found a hole that a green run had been hiding. All three generalise, so they are here rather than in one adapter's notes.

A fixture whose behaviour is invariant under the harness clock exercises nothing. The harness injects ONE frozen instant for a whole fixture directory. CAT048's two midnight-rollover fixtures describe times of day that resolve to the receipt date at that instant — so they produced correct golden files, passed every check, and tested no rollover in either direction. A fixture that depends on the relationship between the payload's time and the clock has to inject its own clock from tests/, and the fixture row should say so; the harness pass is about the golden file, not about the behaviour. This will recur for every format that states a time of day without a date, which is most of them.

A round trip proves self-consistency, never correctness. Correctness needs an external anchor. encode(decode(x)) == x and inverse(direct(x)) == x both pass when the two halves share a wrong constant, because the error cancels. Replacing WGS-84's semi-major axis with its semi-minor — a 21 km error — passed every one of CAT048's geodesic inversion tests for exactly that reason. The hole class is any derive/invert pair whose shared constants encode a MODEL rather than a single documented scale factor: an LSB is one number a reviewer checks against the specification by eye, an ellipsoid or a projection is not, and only the second kind can hide inside a round trip. So audit the model separately, against something outside the implementation —

• cat048_codec pins WGS-84 by its published constants and by three geodesic distances computed independently of it (one degree of longitude at the equator, one of latitude, the quarter meridian).
• gmtif_codec already had the right shape and it is worth naming as the pattern: its strongest tests are the worked examples the standard itself prints — BA16 0101100100011100 = 125.31006° and −34.876099° = SA16 1100111001100110 — which are anchors the implementation cannot influence.
• asterix_cat021's scale factors are the safe kind: each is a single stated LSB, checkable against the document without running anything.

The roster sweep is a manual protocol act, and prose counts are what it is for. When an adapter joins the shipped roster, eight documents restate how many adapters there are and four of them do the pair arithmetic as well — and nothing in the harness reads prose. The sweep is:

1. grep every spelled-out number within 120 characters of the word "adapter", across *.md, *.mdx and *.py. The narrower form — grepping for the previous count word, "eight" or "nine" — is what the adapter #11 sweep started with, and it missed synapse_cdm/__init__.py, which still said "five adapters means ten translations" four adapters later. A site that is stale by more than one release does not contain the previous count word, so searching for it cannot find the sites that have drifted furthest.
2. Check the pair arithmetic at every site that states a number, not just the count. Two documents disagreed on whether it is N×(N−1) or N(N−1)/2, which for the nine adapters of the day was 72 against 36; neither was wrong on its own page and together they were a contradiction. At ten it is 90 against 45.
3. Read every sentence that states the count TWICE. symbology.py and docs/docs/cdm/entity.mdx both carry "so that ten adapters cannot grow ten slightly different opinions", and commit 94c000a had to repair that sentence half-updated — "seven adapters cannot grow six" — which reads as prose either way.
4. Read the gap list's own tallies. FORMAT_COVERAGE.md gap 1 counts how many adapters park a private name key, and it had been undercounting itself by one adapter since adapter #6. A count that IS the argument decays exactly like any other.
5. Count the SUBSETS too, and not only the roster. A count that names a subset — "the ICAO24 namespace serves N adapters", "the contract has been stable across all N of them" — looks safe because it is not the roster count, and drifts for the same reason with nothing watching. The SDK close-out sweep found both of those wrong: version.py argued the 1.0.0-not-0.x ruling from "ten adapters are shipped … stable across all NINE of them", one sentence stating the count twice and half-updated; and stanag4676.py said three adapters share the ICAO24 source-id namespace when cat048 had made it four. The second is the harder shape, because the subset is derivable from the code and the prose was the only place it was ever counted.
6. Know which counts are NOT drift, so the sweep does not churn them. Two kinds are correct while disagreeing with today's roster, and both have to stay: a past-tense narrative about a specific past run (harness.py and adapter.py both describe "a gate sweep over all nine adapters", which is a thing that happened, not a claim about now — the past tense is what marks it, and where it would not, this repository writes "of the day"), and a changelog entry, where "now serves three adapters" means at that release and updating it would falsify the record. tests/test_cdm_prose_counts.py exempts the MIGRATIONS.md occurrence by path and then requires it to still be inside ## History and still to be behind today's number, so the exemption cannot quietly come to cover a live claim.
7. Prefer deleting a restated count to re-syncing it. Two sites this round said what gap 1's table already said and both were stale — ais.py at "four keys across two adapters" and the NITS section at "four private keys… no seventh key" while the table read eight and seven. Neither was re-synced; both now cite gap 1 and state no number, because a second statement re-drifts and a citation cannot.

A structured-status counter is blind to all of this. The adapter #11 flip counter walked every Status-bearing table row, correctly reported zero rows left saying not yet, and did not see the two prose sentences in the same section that still described the row set as unimplemented. Anything that parses tables will report clean while the paragraphs around them contradict them.

tests/test_cdm_prose_counts.py now pins the eight sites the sweep has already had to fix, so a half-edit at a KNOWN site fails a build. It is deliberately an allowlist and not a scanner — a general prose-number check would flag "two altitudes that are two different measurements" and need an exemption list larger than the sweep it replaced — so finding a NEW site is still the sweep's job, and adding it to that allowlist is how the sweep's work stops being undone.

None of the three is something the six checks can produce, and that is the point of writing them down here: a green harness run is a floor.

Layout

Repository root, then the package:

packages/cdm/
  pyproject.toml    distribution metadata; version is READ FROM version.py, never restated
  synapse_cdm/
    models.py       the four objects, Position, Kinematics, SourceRef, Integrity, payloads
    enums.py        closed vocabularies; UNKNOWN is a member, never a null
    geo.py          GeoJSON Point/LineString/Polygon, [lon, lat], ring closure enforced
    times.py        one timestamp form, one injectable clock
    ids.py          derived stable identity (uuid5) and the id basis
    version.py      SCHEMA_VERSION and the compatibility rule
    symbology.py    MIL-STD-2525D standard identity, CoT affiliation letters
    lossless.py     the never-drop rule as a computable check
    adapter.py      the Adapter ABC, its class-definition-time gates, the registry
    schemas.py      JSON Schema export (+ --check for CI)
    harness.py      the adapter-agnostic validation harness
    adapters/       one module per external system (pntmap, tak, ais, adsb, …)
    fixtures/       synthetic payloads + golden outputs
schemas/            published JSON Schema, generated — never hand-edited
tests/test_cdm_*.py

schemas/ sits at the repository root rather than inside the package because it is the artefact for OTHER languages: a Go or TypeScript consumer clones this repository and reads those files, and burying the one thing they need under a Python package layout would be a Python assumption in a deliberately language-neutral contract. The generator writes both copies from one source — python -m synapse_cdm.schemas --check --out schemas is the CI form and fails on any drift.

synapse_cdm depends on nothing but pydantic and jsonschema — in particular nothing from the SynapseCommand product repository (agents/, core/, platform/, synapse-data/, airtasking/) — which is why it could be lifted out into this repository at all. It also contains no crypto: the integrity field is designed and deliberately unpopulated, because a signature computed inside a translator is held by nothing that audits it. Both properties are enforced by AST over the package's own sources in tests/test_cdm_boundary.py, not by this paragraph.