--- title: "Ontology" description: "The minimum shared concepts used across Pre interfaces and systems." navLabel: "Ontology" order: 32 nav: false navGroup: "Explore" eyebrow: "Shared language" status: "canonical" theme: "main" visibility: "public" --- ## 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:` 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 `.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.