# A Systematic Review of Cyber Range Taxonomies: Trends, Gaps, and a Proposed Taxonomy
## 4 Taxonomy Mapping Toolkit
### Taxonomy Mapping Tool (TMT)  
The Taxonomy Mapping Tool was developed with five primary objectives:  
1. _Mapping literature to taxonomy elements:_ To allow for the seamless linking of records to specific elements in a taxonomy, ensuring that the taxonomy could be verified against existing research. 2. _Gathering and organizing data:_ To provide a structured way to capture data for each taxonomy element and allow for easy navigation and visualization. 3. _Collaboration and consistency:_ To create a uniform platform where team members could collaboratively map records to the taxonomy in a standardized way, avoiding discrepancies and ensuring consistency. 4. _Exposing the taxonomy to the research community:_ To make the taxonomy and the mapped records accessible to the cyber security community, enabling other researchers to inspect the records, validate the study group findings and contributions, and create customized versions of a taxonomy for their own research purposes. 5. _Exporting the taxonomy and literature to spreadsheet file format:_ To allow tool users to export the taxonomy and its associated literature into a structured spreadsheet file format, ensuring that the taxonomy could be shared, analyzed offline, and integrated with other workflows while maintaining a clear and structured format for the data. The taxonomy is visualized using a radial layout as an interactive tree structure, as shown in Figure 6.  
Figure 6: Interactive tree visualization of the taxonomy. Each node is color-coded based on its category to improve readability and navigation. Key features of the TMT tree visualization include the following:  
* _Expand/collapse nodes:_ Parent nodes can be expanded to reveal their child elements or collapsed to simplify the view. For example, the root node _Cyber Range_ has multiple child nodes such as _Scenario_, _Environment_, and _Teaming_. * _Interactive controls:_ Each node includes interactive icons:
* An information icon is a clickable button that can be used to view detailed descriptions and map records. * The plus icon is a clickable button that can be used to add child elements. * The modal icon is a clickable button that can be to manage literature references. * _Color coding:_ Each node is assigned a distinct color to differentiate categories visually. For instance, in Figure 6, the dimension _Scenario_ is colored orange, _Environment_ is colored red, and _Teaming_ is colored green. Using colors enhances readability and helps users quickly identify and group related elements. * _Dynamic sizing:_ Nodes dynamically adjust their size based on the length of their labels, ensuring that the text remains legible. Users can then create new taxonomy elements and edit existing ones through a graphical interface. The TMT also has an expandable sidebar where users can add literature and select literature to map to the taxonomy. The sidebar consists of two parts: The first part contains a form for adding papers, while the second part contains the added literature, where the literature can be searched, edited, or deleted. When adding new records, the user must enter the title of the paper, the author(s), the date of publication, a URL, and a note summarizing the literature. All but the note field is required when adding new records. To save the changes, the user must click the blue _Add Literature_ button. The records (i.e., literature) are then added to the list in the sidebar. To return to the normal state, where it is possible to add records, etc., the user must click on the _Deselect Literature_ button. The TMT also supports real-time collaboration using a set of back-end cloud computing services from Google Firebase, enabling multiple users to work on the exact taxonomy simultaneously. Changes made by one user are immediately reflected by all other users, ensuring consistency and improving productivity. The last key feature of TMT is the ability to export a taxonomy and its associated records into a Microsoft Excel (spreadsheet) file.