Glossary

This glossary is normative for terminology unless a protocol volume explicitly defines a narrower meaning.

Act — An immutable, attributable, evidence-bearing record of an authorized or claimed state transition finalized or prepared for finalization on Actum.

Actum — The verifiable action substrate providing commitments, evidence references, lineage, finality, settlement state, and asset transfer.

Actum Compute — The capability-resolution and economic layer for expert execution, K-line artifacts, evaluation, evidence, and raw compute.

ActivationPlan — A pre-execution plan binding a KLineTemplate to context, candidate capabilities, budgets, authority requirements, and validation rules.

Agency — A bounded, schedulable cognitive process operating under the Cognitive Kernel and producing proposals rather than independently owning authoritative state.

ArtifactOffer — An Actum Compute offer to license, distribute, or execute a KLineArtifact.

Assurance Vector — A structured set of independent evidence statuses such as provider identity, model label, request binding, result binding, authority, freshness, and finality.

Capability — A semantic description of problem-solving or action-producing competence independent of a particular supplier.

CapabilityRequirement — A typed demand object expressing required capability, quality, evidence, trust policy, privacy, jurisdiction, latency, cost, energy, and execution constraints.

Cognitive ABI — The common runtime interface through which cognitive components exchange typed demands, bindings, executions, proposals, evaluations, episodes, and learning signals.

Cognitive Capital — Evaluated, reusable cognition whose durable utility can be deployed, distributed, licensed, measured, and further compiled.

Cognitive Compiler — The subsystem that transforms successful System-2 cognition into progressively cheaper System-1 implementations while preserving required semantics and constraints.

Cognitive Kernel — The local control plane that schedules attention and cognitive processes, chooses System 1 or System 2, manages resource and authority boundaries, and coordinates state transitions.

Compiler Society — The set of specialized compiler agencies responsible for transformations such as topology simplification, distillation, rule extraction, quantization, benchmark generation, and mobile optimization.

Distributed Cognitive Network (DCN) — The federation of Minds, experts, K-lines, artifacts, markets, evaluators, evidence services, and execution environments that share cognition without requiring a single global trust authority.

Evidence Graph — A directed graph of evidence nodes and relationships such as supports, verifies, derived-from, contradicts, references, or supersedes.

EvaluationAct — An Act recording that a defined evaluation protocol was applied to a subject under a declared environment and distribution.

EvaluationClaim — A contextual quality claim linking a subject to an evaluation protocol, distribution, environment, result, evaluator, and evidence.

EvaluationProtocol — A reproducible definition of dataset or distribution commitments, sampling, metrics, scoring, contamination policy, environment, and acceptance thresholds.

ExecutionAct — An Act recording a concrete realization of a requested capability, its authority, bindings, evidence, and resulting state commitments.

ExecutionClass — A market-level definition of execution properties that materially affect value, such as provider, model class, tools, privacy, and required evidence.

Expert — Any entity capable of satisfying a cognitive capability, including models, humans, tools, organizations, agents, workflows, or K-line artifacts.

ExpertBinding — The concrete late-bound selection of an expert or artifact that satisfies a CapabilityRequirement for an execution.

ExpertOffer — An Actum Compute advertisement of an expert's available capabilities, execution classes, quality evidence, capacity, pricing, and settlement terms.

K-line — A reusable organization of cognition for a class of situations. The protocol represents it through templates, episodes, and artifacts rather than as a prompt or vendor-specific workflow.

KLineArtifact — A compiled executable implementation of a K-line for a particular environment or optimization profile.

KLineEpisode — An immutable record of one concrete K-line execution, including actual expert bindings, evidence, cost, latency, context commitments, and outcome.

KLineTemplate — The reusable semantic and typed cognitive topology defining triggers, capability requirements, control/data flow, validation, budgets, authority requirements, and fallbacks.

Mind — A persistent local or organizational cognitive system containing world state, memory, goals, trust views, K-lines, artifacts, authority context, and the Cognitive Kernel.

Novelty — A pre-execution estimate of how unfamiliar a problem or context is relative to known cognition.

Patch Proposal — A semantic proposal for changing authoritative world state, generated by cognition and subject to validation and authorization before commitment.

PromotionAct — An Act recording that a KLineTemplate satisfied a defined promotion policy and became eligible for System-1 use in the relevant scope.

Semantic Fingerprint — A non-cryptographic representation for discovering semantically related cognition. It does not replace content hashes or authored object identity.

Society of Experts — The heterogeneous set of specialized cognitive resources that a Mind can compose to solve problems.

Surprise — A post-execution measure of mismatch between expected and observed behavior, used to trigger revalidation, demotion, or System-2 reopening.

System 1 — Reusable, sufficiently validated cognition eligible for low-cost routine execution, including K-lines and compiled artifacts.

System 2 — Deliberative and exploratory cognition used for novelty, ambiguity, conflict, failure, and frontier problem solving.

TLSNotary — An external evidence mechanism capable of proving authenticated selectively disclosed TLS communication such as provider endpoint and request/response fields; it does not prove undisclosed server internals.

VSTP — The semantic state-transition model binding prior state, intent/action, authority, evidence, and resulting state.

World Model — The persistent semantic representation of beliefs, entities, relationships, observations, goals, plans, episodes, authority, and procedural cognition maintained by a Mind.

ZeroK — The confidential verification layer used to prove selected predicates over private execution, market, evaluation, reputation, or settlement data without unnecessary disclosure.