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.
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