Glossary

47 defined terms: 30 locked at v1.0 and 17 added at v1.1. Terms added at v1.1 are marked. The 23 refused rows below are generated from component_register.json, the estate's single allocation point for component names, by way of the same vocabulary artefact the terminology gate scans with. A term this page refuses is a term that gate fails on, because both read one file.

Status. Controlled Vocabulary v1.1 is prepared and not yet signed. It is effective on signature and not before, and it is published in this state rather than held, because the alternative is a glossary that keeps publishing a term the architecture freeze withdrew.

Why a refused term is a defect and not a style preference

Each refused term below was retired for a reason that survives the reason it was coined.

• Adaptive Compute named a mechanism with no owner.
• Router, unqualified, is ambiguous once a capability, a source and a verifier are all being selected. Write Capability Router or Data Router. Both casings are refused: an upper-case ROUTER on a console label is the same unqualified name.
• Execution DNA, Compute Genome and Architecture Genome are branding for a hashable record of how a mission ran, which is an Execution Record.
• Architecture Planner collided with the system's own architecture. It is a Mission Planner.
• Orchestrator was already forbidden as a synonym for the Task Graph; the component that owns the manner of running is the Execution Planner.
• Fabric, as a component suffix, carries no design information and disguises a small adapter layer as a system.
• Entity Graph is the Knowledge Graph.
• Cost Engine was withdrawn at architecture freeze: two homes for one calculation is how two calculations appear. There is one cost model with one owner.
• Provider Independence contradicts the position published at NEO-AI-R-001 §4.4. Use Provider Replaceability.

A retired name is permitted only on a line that also says it is retired or names its replacement — which is what this page does, and what a careless reuse does not.

A

Admissible Set

The set of candidates that survive admissibility before any scoring runs. Scoring an inadmissible candidate is how one wins on quality.

Agent Identity Layer v1.1

A component grouping, not a plane: bounded, identified, credentialled runtimes and the delegation chains they carry.

Amdahl Ceiling v1.1

The arithmetic bound on any end-to-end efficiency ratio, given fixed per-mission overhead. It refuses a claim whose evidence package is in perfect order.

Assurance Plane

Whether the result meets its criteria, at a depth proportional to risk, never verified by the thing that generated it.

Authority Plane

Who was entitled to decide: grants, delegation chains, approvals, and the budget and risk dimensions of an envelope.

B

Bounded Autonomy

Autonomy derived from reversibility and potential loss, contracted on defined signals, never derived from a model's confidence in itself.

C

Capability Gate

The gate that blocks production deployment and public capability claims. It never blocks engineering progression.

Capability Register

The public register of capability claims and their maturity status. Distinct from the Capability Registry, which is the internal store of things that can do work.

Capability Router v1.1

Binds a task to a capability: model, runtime, tool, memory, retrieval strategy, source, verifier, locus or human.

Capability Status

One of S1 to S5, resolved from the Capability Register at build time and never typed into a page.

Cheapest Sufficient Data v1.1

The rule that the cheapest tier which answers the question is the right tier, and that sufficiency is the binding word.

Circular Corroboration

Three sources that agree because they are the same source. Independence must be established, never inferred from count.

Claim Class

The class attached to every material statement in this corpus: established, architectural interpretation, design intent or open problem.

Containment

Reducing a mission's authority. It always succeeds for an operator who may see the mission, because containment never requires a grant beyond visibility.

D

Data Plane v1.1

Where an answer's inputs come from, under which licence, and what the record of that is. Four parts, one capability group. Not a ninth plane.

Data Router v1.1

Which source answers this question under these constraints. The Data Router selects a source; the Capability Router selects an executor.

Decision Record

The record of an operational decision: what was decided, by whom, under which grant, on which evidence.

Design Decision Record

The record of an architectural decision and the alternatives it refused. Not the same object as a Decision Record.

E

Evidence Chain

The path from an assertion back through every piece of evidence that supports it, to the origin of each.

Evidence Ladder v1.1

The MAGNITUDE ladder, PJ-14: eight rungs from 1.5x to 100x and their cumulative artefact requirements. A rung may not be skipped and a claim may not exceed the highest rung passed. It is one of two coordinates, not the whole gate: PF-14 defines the orthogonal EVIDENCE-GRADE ladder, Rungs 0 to 5, from anecdote to third-party reproduction, and a claim is licensed only when both coordinates are held. The magnitude rungs are written so that meeting them implies PF-14 Rung 2 at minimum and PF-14 Rung 5 at 100x. Conflating the two is how a well-evidenced 1.6x becomes a poorly-evidenced 100x.

Evidence Layer

The component that produces, grades and serves evidence.

Evidence Ledger

An append-only, hash-addressed store of evidence records.

Execution Plane

Where work is performed under a contract, inside a sandbox, by a bounded identity.

G

Graceful Substitution

Replacing a capability with another that satisfies the same contract, without a rewrite and without a silent change in behaviour.

H

Human Authority

The principle that a human holds the authority a system exercises, and that the record shows who held it.

I

Intelligence Flow v1.1

The movement of work through the system. Excluded against Task Graph and Mission State, which are objects rather than movement.

Interaction Plane

Where a human meets the system: interfaces, supervision surfaces and the record of what was shown.

K

Knowledge Plane

What the system asserts about the world, with the evidence for each assertion and the path back to its origins.

M

Memory Plane

What the system retains about itself, behind one access-mediated API.

Mission

A durable objective NEO owns, with its state, its decisions, its approvals and its artefacts. It outlives any single model call and any single session.

Mission Envelope

The bounded permissions, data scope, resource budget, autonomy level and terminal conditions a mission runs inside. An intersection, never a union.

Mission State

The projection of a mission's event stream. Rendered surfaces read this and never a separate mutable record.

N

NEO System Intelligence v1.1

The name for the composition of the platform's decision-making parts and the register of invariants that composition must hold. Not a service. Not NEO Intelligence.

O

Observable Intelligence v1.1

The property that what a system did can be reconstructed from its record, rather than inferred from its output.

Observe Build v1.1

A mode of Mission Control over one event stream, not a separate system.

Operational Decision Event v1.1

A recorded decision taken while a mission runs. Distinguished from a Decision Record and a Design Decision Record.

P

Policy Plane

Whether an action is permitted: principals, permissions, purpose, jurisdiction and tenant isolation.

Provenance Passport v1.1

The per-datum record of source, timestamp, licence, jurisdiction, retention, permitted use, training and redistribution rights, caching rights and expiry. It cannot be retrofitted at any price.

Provider Replaceability v1.1

The property that a provider can be replaced under contract. Used instead of provider independence, which the corpus refuses.

R

Reasoning Plane

Where the shape of the work is decided: interpretation, planning and binding.

Router

Refused unqualified. Write Capability Router or Data Router. See the refused-terms table below.

S

Source Intelligence v1.1

A view over the Execution Store: how each source has actually performed. A measurement of sources, not the investigation vertical.

Source Registry v1.1

What sources exist, what they cost, what they cover and what their licence permits. Global source records; per-tenant entitlement records.

System-Level Benchmarking v1.1

Measurement taken at the boundary of the whole system on an accepted mission, rather than at the boundary of a model.

T

Task Graph

The durable representation of work. It invokes nothing; it is the thing an executor is bound to.

Trajectory

The recorded path a mission actually took, as distinct from the plan it started with.

V

Validation Layer

The verifier ladder: generator and verifier are separable, and verification cost scales with risk. The component that owns it is Verification, allocated as component 12 of the component register and published as the register entry brain.validation; Validation Engine is a retired name for the same component.

Refused terms

Disambiguation