Glossary

Account — the identity-derived isolation boundary for every durable row, enforced by Phoenix, Ash policies, and PostgreSQL RLS. Community serves one.

Ask — cited answer generation over retrieved memory, with abstention. Defaults to thorough.

Belief time — when the system learned or holds a claim (inserted_at, revalidate_after, expires_at). Distinct from valid time.

Blast radius — how far a statement can be seen: one peer, a scope, or the whole Account. Wider radius, higher bar.

Candidate — one result from a retrieval strategy, before or after fusion.

Confidence — how sure the system is of a statement. Independent of sensitivity.

Consent — a subject's verified, scope-specific permission for personal knowledge about them to move to a wider scope. No curator can substitute for it.

Context — a budgeted, reasoning-free assembly of governed knowledge, a session summary, scope cards, and a peer profile, built from projections.

Contract version — a version string on a response shape, such as f7-1, independent of the application's semantic version. See Contract versions.

Curator — a human role that may approve, edit, reject, merge, and defer proposals. Unreachable by machine credentials.

Deadline — the hard wall-clock ceiling on retrieval, covering strategies and reranking. Strategies that miss it are dropped and reported.

Dream-time — background consolidation, entity resolution, and revalidation planning over governed knowledge; throttled first under token pressure.

Entity — a canonical referent linking mentions of the same thing. A rebuildable, pipeline-internal cache exposed through no public surface.

Erasure — removal of a subject's data. Proportionate removes subject content and scrubs shared provenance; strict also removes knowledge sourced only through that subject. Neither retracts a claim with surviving independent provenance.

Fusion — merging several strategies' ranks (not scores) with weighted reciprocal rank, k = 60.

Gate A — decides whether a candidate statement is kept, rejected, or deferred for review.

Gate B — decides how widely a kept statement may be seen.

Gate rule / matrix cell — the configuration keyed by target level and sensitivity that both gates consult. A missing rule falls back to human review.

Held — a lifecycle state: a scope- or account-level proposal parked at its source scope and absent from retrieval.

Idempotency key — the deterministic key that makes replaying a job merge provenance rather than duplicate knowledge.

Ingest — recording a raw observation. The only write path an agent has.

Knowledge — one immutable natural-language statement with confidence, sensitivity, subject, provenance, lifecycle state, and timestamps.

Lifecycle state — the governance position of a statement: proposed, provisional, active, held, needs_revalidation, contested, superseded, expired, stale, rejected, redacted, retracted. Retrieval filters on it.

Model role — one of exactly four Account-level roles: embedder, ingest_extractor, dream_reasoner, dialectic_agent.

Peer — one participant: a human, or an agent holding an API key.

pg0 — the checksum-pinned PostgreSQL distribution the packaged release supervises for itself.

Pipeline — the extraction machinery, and the only writer of knowledge.

Profile — a named, versioned retrieval bundle: strategies, weights, rerank flag, and deadline. fast, balanced, thorough.

Projection — rebuildable peer profiles, scope cards, session summaries, and context payloads derived from knowledge.

Provenance — which messages or document versions support a statement, and how many independent sources it has.

Provisional — a lifecycle state: visible only to the peer the statement came from, while validation is pending.

Raw observation — what agents submit: a message, or a document version.

Reciprocal rank fusion — the merge algorithm: a candidate at rank r contributes weight / (k + r).

Rerank — an optional model-backed reordering of the fused head, used only by the thorough profile.

Revalidation — the scheduled recheck of an accepted statement. Once due, the item stops satisfying skill requirements immediately.

Scope — a path in a containment tree. Inheritance is downward and nearest-wins.

Search — ranked retrieval over governed memory, with no answer generation. Defaults to the balanced profile.

Sensitivity — how exposed a statement may be. Independent of confidence.

Session — a conversation grouping for raw messages, created on demand.

Skill requirement card — human-authored, plainly versioned procedural memory stating what a skill needs before it runs. Not knowledge; does not pass the gates.

Strategy — one independent candidate generator: Semantic, Lexical, Temporal, SalienceRecency, EntityMatch, RelationExpand.

Subject — who or what a statement is about. Not the same as its source.

Supersession — replacing a statement or a document version with a newer one, without rewriting history.

Target level — how far a proposal is asking to travel: peer, scope, or account.

Tombstone — the marker left when a remote document is deleted, so that knowledge with surviving provenance is not retracted.

Usage ledger — the durable, exact record of every model call (UsageEvent). The ETS counters in front of it are rebuildable.

Valid time — when a claim is true in the world (relevant_from, relevant_until). Distinct from belief time.