Ontology

Holon

An independently addressable whole that also participates as part of larger wholes.

Pre Account

A durable holon that serves as the default top-level custody, authority, billing, export, restore, and succession boundary for a person, family, organization, archive, community, or separately governed initiative.

A Pre Account is not necessarily a natural person, login, legal entity, hostname, billing customer, database, repository, or provider tenant. Those may be related records or external bindings.

Address

A stable storage-neutral identifier using the canonical Pre address grammar. Address segments provide namespacing and readability; they do not encode authority, hierarchy, ownership, or membership.

A canonical account address uses an opaque stable identifier such as account:<stable-id> so a name, slug, or domain may change without changing the account.

Network binding

An external binding between a canonical account or other Pre object and a network-facing identifier such as <slug>.pre.bi, a custom domain, an email address, or a provider tenant.

A network binding supports lookup and projection. It grants no authority by itself and may be replaced without deleting canonical history.

Participant

A human, agent, controller, reviewer, CI system, device, organization, or external service capable of receiving context or producing attributable state transitions.

Identity

The durable claim or address through which a participant remains attributable across sessions and substrates.

Identity binding

An admitted record that permits one participant to act through one identity under a named authenticator, assurance level, issuer, and time window. It may be revoked without rewriting the original binding.

Membership

An addressable relationship between a member and a container, including a Pre Account, with attributed roles. Membership can become the subject of an explicit capability, but neither membership nor role text grants authority by itself.

Authority

A relationship-derived permission to perform a bounded action in a particular context. Authority is resolved from admitted records and policy, not inferred from an address, hostname, account label, or caller-supplied claim.

Capability

An immutable, time-, subject-, action-, target-, field-, and risk-bound permission. Delegation creates a new child capability that must attenuate its parent.

Context grant

An immutable permission for a subject to retrieve specified fields from specified context targets. Context delegation also attenuates and remains separately revocable.

Cross-account context requires an explicit grant; shared people or relationships do not collapse account custody boundaries.

Revocation

An immutable record that withdraws a prior authority record from a stated time and actor. Revocation preserves the original grant and its historical provenance.

Action request

A versioned request by a participant to perform one bounded action against an addressable target. The current representation is pre.action.v1.

Request claim

The durable binding of participant, idempotency key, request address, action digest, and claim time. It distinguishes a new request from replay, conflict, or incomplete recovery.

Action result

A versioned response from a trusted boundary that distinguishes admission, execution state, and objective verification. The current representation is pre.result.v1.

Relation

An addressable connection between holons. A relation may itself carry provenance, evidence, policy, history, and further relations.

Record

A durable representation of an observation, communication, artifact, relationship, state, or decision.

An account-owned record retains its account scope even when projected through another interface or external provider.

Assertion

A claim made by a participant or derived process. Assertions are not automatically truth and retain source, confidence, disagreement, and correction history.

Event

An immutable structured observation or state transition.

Event stream

An explicitly addressed sequence of events linked by ordinal and predecessor reference. Streams provide deterministic local reconstruction without requiring one global order.

Artifact

Durable material such as a file, commit, report, test result, screenshot, message original, physical-object observation, or signed output.

Evidence

An attributable record that an artifact, observation, test, or other fact may support an objective determination. Evidence is not itself a verdict.

Task and run

A task is a bounded objective with dependencies and required deliverables. A run is one execution attempt for that task. Customer, family, or organization tasks and runs must resolve an account scope before access.

Receipt

An immutable, idempotent record binding a finalized request and result to their digests and event references.

Objective verdict

A durable determination by an explicitly authorized evaluator that an objective was verified, not met, or not applicable. Verdicts retain evidence, rationale, disagreement, and supersession.

Projection

A purpose-specific representation of canonical relational state, such as a page, CLI response, Linear issue, DOM view, account inbox, email thread, print artifact, spatial scene, or JSON document.

External binding

A reversible mapping between a canonical Pre object and an external object, including field-level direction, write mode, and conflict policy.

Hostnames, custom domains, email addresses, Brevo objects, GitHub objects, and payment-provider objects remain external bindings rather than canonical ownership.

Binding conflict

An explicit record that canonical and external projections disagree on a governed field.

Engagement

An account-scoped commercial or sponsored commitment defining scope, budget, deliverables, acceptance, stewardship, and external billing or payment bindings. An engagement does not itself transfer account authority beyond explicit capabilities and memberships.

Entitlement

An account-scoped allowance or service commitment for storage, communications, model use, support, or another metered or contractual resource. Entitlements do not replace action-level authority.

Export

A versioned, bounded, reconstructable projection of account or protocol state sufficient for portability, audit, restoration, or succession according to custody and disclosure policy.

Succession

The explicit continuation of selected history, context, attribution, or obligations across a change in participant, model, device, executor, custodian, account steward, or generation. Succession does not imply numerical identity or authority transfer.