---
title: Glossary
description: The platform's terms of art — contract, corpus, carve, grounding, dedup defer, instance and friends — each defined in one or two sentences.
locale: en
version: 0.2.0
canonical: https://enterium-developer-docs.pages.dev/developers/platform/glossary/
---

> Documentation index: https://enterium-developer-docs.pages.dev/developers/llms.txt — every page of this portal has a Markdown twin at <route>.md; the frozen API contract is at https://enterium-developer-docs.pages.dev/developers/api/openapi.json.

Terms you will meet across this portal and in the platform's own responses.

| Term | Meaning |
| --- | --- |
| **Contract** | The central unit of work: one niche + one brand + one destination site, with its own configuration and research corpus. Formally a `salescontracts` entity. |
| **Instance** | One deployed destination site (a static site built by the publishing hub), linked to a contract. |
| **Ontology** | The contract's declared topic space — the entities and themes its content is about; used to rank source candidates and align drafts. |
| **Corpus / research fact** | The contract's accumulated base of source-attributed facts. Generation grounds its numbers and claims here rather than inventing them. |
| **RAG / grounding** | Retrieval-augmented generation: drafting against retrieved corpus facts and live sources. "Grounded" means a claim can point at its source. |
| **Carve** | Creating a new immutable pipeline version: copy the previous version's directory, apply the change, register it in the catalog. Existing versions are never edited. |
| **Pin** | An explicit pipeline-version selection (per contract, or for the nightly run) that overrides the catalog's `latest` pointer. |
| **Daily run** | The nightly scheduled batch that drives Collect → Generate → publish across all active contracts. |
| **Dedup defer** | The topic-deduplication gate's verdict for a too-similar article: publication is postponed (the topic may free up), not discarded. |
| **Quarantine** | A holding state for content or corpus facts that failed a gate — excluded from use until reviewed. |
| **Grounding gate** | The publish-path check that verifies numerical/normative claims against sources and blocks ungrounded ones. |
| **Brand defense** | The mechanisms that keep an article promoting the contract's own brand instead of a competitor: declared competitor lists, demotion, and detector signals. |
| **Lifecycle (`lcid`/`lcstep`)** | The metamodel's state machine for a business entity; "active contract" is a lifecycle step, not a flag. |
| **Run / run step** | The recorded execution of a pipeline and its per-step progress — the platform's ground truth for "what happened". |
| **Proof-of-publication** | A publication is only counted after the live URL has been fetched and verified reachable. |
| **Agent token** | A scoped JWT for LLM agents: read access to the platform with secrets redacted, write access only to an explicitly granted pool of contracts. |
| **SPEC / `spec_ref`** | An opaque identifier of an internal specification record (`SPEC-…`) that a task or ticket may point at; the public contract shows the shape only (`SPEC-NNN`) — the records themselves are not published. |
| **Grant pool** | The per-agent set of contracts (with capabilities) that its token may write to. Re-issuing a token replaces the pool. |
| **Topic yield** | The topic feedback loop's headline metric: impressions earned per article of a topic, over a maturity-filtered window. |
| **Explore floor** | The protected minimum share of nightly selection reserved for new and under-sampled topics — exploitation can never consume the whole batch. |
| **Health score** | The daily composite per-site SEO score with boolean flags (canonicalization, crawler silence, 404 spikes…), computed by one shared function. |
| **Fail-loud** | The platform's error philosophy: missing required input or a broken invariant stops the run and is recorded, instead of a silent default. |
| **Projector** | The single component that reads the run event stream and writes run/step state to the database — the platform's only DB writer for run state, so ordering and idempotency live in one place. |
| **Reaper** | The maintenance loop that kills stuck database transactions and stale runs so a hung step cannot hold locks or slots forever. |
| **Watchdog / dead-man's switch** | External liveness checks that expect a heartbeat; silence itself is the alarm ("zero is a failure"). |
| **Hub** | The publishing service that builds and deploys the static destination sites and verifies live URLs. |
| **Native worker** | The in-process pipeline executor (as opposed to the earlier subprocess runner) that runs pipeline steps under the run engine's concurrency control. |
| **Seam** | A point where one shared mechanism is invoked from two paths (e.g. the topic-dedup comparator on both the Collect and the publish side) — one core, two seams. |
| **Charter** | The per-step contract of the writing framework: one concern, one owner, declared inputs and outputs. |
| **Contour** | An environment: *dev* (local integration stack) or *prod* (the production host). |
| **Donor** | An existing site or version whose configuration/content seeds a new one (a new instance is cloned from a donor). |
| **Site chrome** | Everything on a published page that is not the article: navigation, footer, author box, legal pages. |
| **Stamp** | A deterministic signal or score written onto an article record as telemetry (not a gate verdict). |
| **Signal battery** | A set of deterministic detectors run together on an article (brand-safety, language consistency, structural checks). |
| **BOLA** | Broken Object Level Authorization — the class of bug where a caller reaches an object it does not own; the agent grant pool is the layer that prevents it. |
| **AIMD** | Additive-increase / multiplicative-decrease — the adaptive concurrency rule the run engine uses against provider rate limits. |
| **E-E-A-T** | Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust — the search-quality frame the authorship model is built around. |
| **IndexNow** | A push protocol for telling search engines about new or changed URLs (implemented; not yet enabled). |

## One thing, several names

The REST API, the MCP tools and the database grew at different times and
kept their own words. The mapping:

| Concept | REST API | MCP tools | Database / other |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Contract | `contracts`, `contract_guid` | `contract`, `sc_id` in payloads | `salescontracts` table, `SalesContract` entity |
| Ticket | `tickets` (`kind`: `defect` or `improvement`) | `entherium_report_defect`, `entherium_propose_improvement`, `entherium_list_defects` | `ticket` |
| Task | `tasks` | `entherium_create_task`, `entherium_list_tasks`, … | `task` |
| Identifier | `guid` | `task_id`, `defect_id` | primary key `guid` |
| Assignee | `assignee_id` (integer user id) | `assignee` (a person's display name, resolved server-side) | `users.guid` |