Shared glossary

This glossary explains recurring terms across the collection. Their precise scope follows the relevant source: two papers may use the same word for related concepts without defining the same contract. The architecture paper classifies those relationships, and each topic paper supplies its own context.

Institutional terms

Term	Meaning in this collection
Institution	A persistent subject of identity, commitments, resources, evidence, and recourse whose continuity can outlast a particular model or process.
Actor	A participant performing a role within an institutional arrangement. An actor need not be a legal person or an authority root.
Principal	The subject to which a power, act, obligation, or responsibility is attributed in a stated domain.
Internal autonomy	Capacity to originate and revise purposes without representing externally imposed decisions as self-originated ones.
Intention	A commitment toward a possible future state. Its existence does not establish permission to realize that state.
Objective	A condition pursued by work. Its source and scope matter; the word does not establish how authority was obtained.
Continuity	Preservation or authorized transformation of the relationships on which institutional identity and reliance depend.
Succession	An explicit transfer or allocation of specified relationships to a successor. It need not imply that the successor is identical to the predecessor.
Obligation	A duty with a responsible party, beneficiary, performance conditions, and applicable means of change or discharge.
Recourse	An available route for seeking a remedy, with its responsible authority and practical limits.
Stewardship	Maintenance and oversight of the conditions under which an institution operates, within a declared authority arrangement.
Custody	Control over a protected power or resource. Distinct credentials or titles do not by themselves establish independent custody.
Beneficial control	The actual relationships through which a person or coalition can influence an institution or benefit from a decision.
Dissolution	Ending active institutional operation under an applicable procedure while preserving remaining accountability and records.

Authority and consequence

Term	Meaning in this collection
Authority	Recognized power to cause a bounded class of changes for a principal in a stated setting.
Authorization	A decision applying the relevant authority and constraints to a proposed action.
Capability	A technical or institutional capacity to perform an operation. Its source-specific meaning must be stated; availability alone does not establish permission.
Grant	A bounded allocation of authority, expressed according to the requirements of the relevant system.
Prohibition	A constraint excluding a class of actions or consequences under the applicable rules.
Revocation	A change removing or limiting authority. It does not automatically erase completed effects or accrued obligations.
Effect	A possible or realized consequence, including disclosure, mutation, expenditure, commitment, or reliance.
Effect boundary	The point or arrangement responsible for governing the actual protected consequence. Its presence must be established in a concrete realization.
Realization of an effect	The occurrence that makes a proposed consequence actual. Approval and preparation are distinct from occurrence; occurrence can be established even when authorization is absent or unresolved. See Cuttlebone §3.1.
Scope	The relevant principals, purposes, resources, audiences, environments, time, and consequences of a statement or power.
Currentness	Whether a record or judgment remains applicable to the state in which it is being used.
Compensation	A remedial action addressing a prior consequence. It need not restore the exact previous world.
Runtime validity	Satisfaction of the declared technical and institutional rules. It does not establish legal, moral, or democratic legitimacy.

Knowledge and evidence

Term	Meaning in this collection
Observation	A captured representation from a source, method, and setting. It can be incomplete, stale, or mistaken.
Evidence	Material relevant to supporting or defeating a particular claim. Its integrity, relevance, and independence are separate questions.
Claim	A proposition with a scope and basis. A claim may remain disputed or become superseded.
Receipt	An attributable record of a stated occurrence or processing result. It does not establish every downstream outcome.
Attestation	An attributable statement by an identified party. The relying party still needs to appraise it.
Verification	Applying a method and standard to evidence for a particular claim.
Proof	An argument or evidential object sufficient under a stated formal or adjudicative standard. The standard must be identified.
Provenance	Information about origins and derivation. Provenance can support appraisal without establishing correctness.
Causal dependence	A claim about what contributed to a result or could influence it. Recorded sequence alone does not establish causal identification.
Working knowledge	Accepted, scoped knowledge used in current work, with provision for contradiction, correction, and retirement.
Negative competence	Evidence about when a role, model, or procedure should not be relied upon.
Audience projection	A selected representation for an audience. Visibility does not confer authority over the underlying facts. See Cuttlebone §3.3.
Behavioral class	Artifacts grouped under one declared comparison contract and observation scope. Proven equivalence and agreement on finite observations support different substitution claims; unknown relationships do not become established through group membership. See SEPION §2.
Accessible capability	Validated performance within declared tasks, conditions, resources, and an evaluation ordering. An observed frontier and an estimate of performance under further trials are different quantities. See Capability elicitation §2.
Historical evidence	Evidence about an identified earlier version, input, or environment. It is not automatically current evidence.
Independent review	Examination by an identified reviewer with a disclosed relationship and scope. Independence must be substantiated.

State, representation, and recovery

Term	Meaning in this collection
Canonical owner	The declared authority for valid changes to a consequential object. It may be implemented by multiple cooperating components.
Derived state	A view calculated from other records whose validity depends on those records and the derivation.
Semantic state	Meaning-bearing state as defined by the source work. CSSL and Semantic OS address related but distinct questions; their names do not imply a common schema.
Ledger	A maintained history with declared rules for ordering, correction, retention, and reconstruction. An authentic ledger can contain mistaken claims.
Replay	Reconstruction or re-execution under identified versions and inputs. A replay is not automatically a live deployment test.
Recovery	Restoring the ability to complete authorized work while reconciling current authority, commitments, evidence, and actual effects.
Idempotency	Within the specified operation and identity scope, repeated processing has the same intended effect as processing once. Responses, logs, and auxiliary records may differ. Setting a value can be idempotent; repeatedly incrementing it ordinarily is not. Idempotency does not imply exactly-once transport delivery. See HTTP Semantics §9.2.2.
IC/POAR realization	An arrangement of software and resources intended to deliver specified behavior. This implementation sense differs from the occurrence of an effect. See IC/POAR §2.
IC/POAR operating projection	A concrete realization for a declared environment, including executable parts, state relationships, operational controls, and evidence. It is an operating arrangement rather than solely an audience view. See IC/POAR §2.
Realm	A distinct setting such as simulation, production, or recovery, when the source defines such a distinction.
Federation	Cooperation among domains that retain their own responsibilities while recognizing specified identities, evidence, or commitments.
Trusted computing base	The components and assumptions whose correctness is necessary for a stated security claim.
Refinement	A demonstrated relation between descriptions or implementations that preserves specified properties under declared assumptions.
Conformance	Satisfaction of a named, versioned, scoped set of requirements. Vocabulary alone does not establish it.

Distinctions that matter

An institutional identity is not a model identifier. A record of execution is not an observation of its full result. A common consequence vocabulary is not a common authority mechanism. A compiler's output is not approval to execute it. A public view is not the owner of the state it displays.

The doctrine's constitutional boundary and MIRAGE's authorization-and-realization account have an explicitly qualified source relationship. They are not interchangeable names for one completed mechanism. Likewise, Cuttlebone's account of consequence, provenance, and audience cannot be inferred merely from a document saying “simulation” or “review.” Consult the relevant topic paper when applying a term to a particular source; its definitions and source guide determine the intended scope.