Glossary

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.
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.