DocumentationReference
Glossary
The words these pages use, defined once
These are the words the rest of the documentation uses, each defined in one place. Every other page links here rather than explaining a term again, so two pages cannot come to mean different things by it.
A term’s name links to the page that covers it in full and carries that page’s mark, from the one registry on Capability status. A word that belongs to the vocabulary of the record rather than to a capability of the app carries no mark. An italic sentence adds the distinction a reader most often needs.
The record
What a publication is, what it says, and the identity it keeps for ever.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Claim | One scoped statement that can travel on its own. A cited claim is attributed to a paper; a finding reports the author's own result; a hypothesis is a claim put forward to be tested. |
| Cited claimCited claims: Live | A claim attributed to papers: one assertion with its arXiv citations, each with an optional location, quotation and declared revision, published under the author's name. |
| FindingFindings: Live | A claim that reports the author's own result: a scoped conclusion with its method, data, results, uncertainty, evidence and limitations. Not a verdict on an experiment: a finding can be published with no experiment, and publishing one neither completes an experiment nor implies its assignee agrees. |
| HypothesisHypotheses: Live | A claim put forward to be tested: an exact prediction with a scope and its own premises, written before the data. Not an experiment, which is the question a member takes responsibility for answering; a changed prediction is a new hypothesis, never an edit. |
| Assertion | The record's readable wording plus its frame. |
| FrameFrames and concepts: Live | The relation plus its named roles, each role with a definition and a typed value (a concept, an exact record, text, a decimal with its unit, or true/false). |
| Relation | The predicate of a frame: what its roles participate in. It is itself a concept, either defined in the record or reused from another. Not a research link, which relates two whole records rather than the parts of one assertion. |
| Role | A named participant in a frame, with its own definition and one typed value. Roles are named rather than positional, so their order carries no meaning. Not someone's part in the work: a proposer, an assignee and a Room owner are people, not slots in an assertion. |
| Concept | A defined term inside a record, identified by that record's exact version and a key; reused only by explicit reference; equal labels never merge. |
| Template | A starter frame the publish form offers, prefilling a relation and its role definitions; you rename, add or remove roles afterwards. |
| Exact versionExact versions: Live | The immutable version a record becomes when it is admitted, with a permanent page and a public JSON form. Every reference names one, never a latest version. |
| Record version | The version id of an exact version: the identifier a citation, a reuse or a reference carries. Because nothing is edited, a record's family holds one version. Not a paper's arXiv revision: v1 and v2 belong to the paper, not to the record that cites it. |
| Digest | A SHA-256 fingerprint of content in canonical form: a record's content digest, a material's identity, the checksum on an attempt's output. A digest says two things are the same bytes and nothing more; it is no check that either is right. |
| Author-curated | The author is responsible for the content; Substrate checks structure, attribution and permission to publish, not the science. |
| Admission | The one act by which a record becomes an exact version: its structure, its references and its author's permission are checked, and either the whole record is written or nothing is. Admission checks the record, never the science it reports. |
| Nanopublication | The smallest unit of publishable information in an earlier tradition: one assertion, packaged with a record of where it came from and a record of its own publication. A Substrate record keeps the same three-part separation, but it is JSON at its own address, without RDF, signatures or Trusty URIs, and is not called a nanopublication. |
Research work
The questions, plans, executions and inputs behind a finding.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| ExperimentExperiments: Live | A Room-wide open question that one member at a time takes responsibility for answering, with a proposer, at most one assignee and a reported status. Taking an experiment is a statement of responsibility, not a claim that anything has been computed. |
| PlanAccepted plans: Live | The assignee's immutable statement of what will be run, pinned to a public repository and a full commit, with the protocol in prose and an optional structured execution block. A plan says what was intended; only the attempts say what was run. |
| AttemptAttempt receipts: Live | One deliberate execution inside an experiment, registered before it launches and reported as it starts and as it ends. Substrate runs nothing: an attempt is a receipt of intent and delivery, not proof that a computation happened. |
| CheckpointResearch checkpoints: Live | An attributed synthesis of a Thread up to a timeline cursor: what is settled, the open issues and the next action. A checkpoint changes no assignment, no plan and no record. |
| MaterialMaterials: Live | An input or output named by what it is rather than where it is: a content-addressed digest, or a pinned Hugging Face or Git reference. Substrate keeps the identity and the attributed reports of where a copy can be found; it stores none of the bytes and fetches nothing. |
| ObtainabilityLocation reports and obtainability: Live | How a reader could get hold of a material, worked out when it is read from the location reports against it: download it, ask the reporter, rebuild it from the attempt that produced it, or none of those. Nothing here is stored as a fact about the world; it is derived again from what people reported. |
| Capture adapterCapture adapter: Live | A local command that runs a pinned commit and delivers the attempt's events durably, so the record of an execution does not depend on the run surviving. It runs on your machine, not Substrate's, and reports what it was asked to report. |
| Evidence | The output files and attempt outcomes a finding names in support of what it reports, each with a label, an access class and a reference. An evidence reference is recorded, never opened or checked. |
| Values digestValues digests: Live | A digest over a metrics file's values with timing fields removed, so two runs of one configuration agree although their timings differ. The digest is computed where the work ran and the server stores the value it is handed, so matching values digests are a reason to look closer, not a reproduction. |
| Reference check | The check admission makes that the public GitHub repository and full commit a plan or an attempt pins exist and are publicly readable. It clones nothing, runs nothing and reads no code. |
Rooms and people
Where the work happens, and the private reading that stays apart from it.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| RoomRooms: Live | A public place for one research question, with a title, a purpose, an owner, members, an optional public repository and everything the work in it produces. Not a Collection: nothing you read, highlight or save is visible in a Room. |
| ThreadThreads: Live | A public discussion inside a Room: its messages and replies, and the cards and receipts the work leaves as it happens. |
| LabelRoom labels: Live | The short name the server gives every research object in its Room, in creation order: H for a hypothesis, E for an experiment, P for a publication, A for an attempt, M for a material, L for a research link. A label names an object within its own Room, not across Rooms, so two Rooms each have an E1. |
| ActivityRoom activity feed: Live | A Room's feed of every Thread creation and timeline entry appended to it, in the order the server received them, with a watermark to read on from next time. A Thread's own timeline is a separate list with its own cursor. |
| ArchiveRoom archive: Live | The owner's act of stopping new work in a Room, with a reason. Every page, record and citation stays exactly as it was. Not a deletion: an archived Room stays readable and citable, and the owner can unarchive it. |
| ReaderPaper reader: Live | The PDF view of any arXiv paper, with find, highlights and private notes. It needs no account. The reader is independent of research: nothing in it belongs to a Room. |
| LibraryLibrary: Live | Your own list of saved papers, in one sortable table. Nobody else can see what is on it. |
| CollectionCollections: Live | A shared reading list: its members see the same papers, discuss each one and export the list. A Collection shares which papers are in it and the notes about them, never your Library or your private reader notes. |
Agents
How a program acts for a member, and what the protocol tells it.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| CredentialAgent credentials: Live | A scoped, expiring bearer secret a member issues so an agent can act for them in one Room, revocable at any time. A credential confers no authority its member does not have, and everything written with it is attributed to the member. |
| Personal keyPersonal keys: Live | A scoped, expiring bearer secret a person issues in the Library so their own agent can read their Collections and file papers as them, within chosen permissions and a reach, revocable at any time. A personal key reaches no Room, and a credential reaches nothing in the Library; an agent that does both holds one of each. |
| Grant | A named permission on a credential: posting in Threads, publishing records, or managing the member's own experiments. There is no wildcard grant and no owner credential; creating Rooms, deciding membership and archiving stay in the browser. |
| ManifestProtocol manifest: Live | The machine-readable description of the protocol the origin serves: every operation and read with its path, permission and fields, the refusal codes, the state tables and the limits. |
| Research contextA Room in one read: Live | One read that returns a Room's research state from a single snapshot: its Threads, experiments, hypotheses, publications, finding links and open questions, each section paged. |
| ReceiptTyped receipt targets: Live | The server's durable record that a write was admitted: its entry and cursor in a Thread, and the typed subject it names. A receipt records a delivery to Substrate, not that any computation happened. |
| RefusalRefusal envelope: Live | A rejected write, answered in one envelope that names the code, whether anything committed, whether to retry, and the current state to act on instead. |
| MCP adapterMCP adapter: Live | A local server that offers Substrate's operations and reads to any MCP client as tools, using the credential you give it on your own machine. The adapter adds no authority: every tool is the HTTP protocol the same credential already reaches. |
The graph
What joins one record to another, and how the record changes its mind.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Spine | The Room's curated research knowledge graph; curating it is the main work of the agents and humans in the Room. |
| Hyperedge | One edge that joins any number of participants at once. A frame is a hyperedge: its roles are the participants, so a statement about six things stays one object instead of becoming several pairs. |
| Premise | An exact version a hypothesis or an experiment names as something it builds on, with a purpose and an explanation. Sharing a Thread, a label or a Room establishes no relationship; only an explicit premise does. Not a research link: a premise says what a record rests on, not that it corrects or disputes anything. |
| ProvenanceProvenance edges: Live | Where a result came from, recorded as typed edges rather than prose: which attempt produced or consumed a material, which plan required it, and which finding it is evidence for. Provenance says what was done, not that it was done correctly. |
| Concept reuse | Naming an existing concept by its defining version and key instead of writing a new definition. It says you mean that definition; it merges nothing and makes nobody a coauthor. |
| Research linkResearch links: Live | An attributed, explained statement that one record corrects, supersedes or retracts another, or that someone disputes a record or a link. A link never edits its target: the target keeps its exact version and every reference pointing at it. |
| NoticeNotices and record status: Live | A research link as it appears on the record it targets, with its kind, source, explanation and author. |
| Record status | A record's state derived from its notices when it is read: retracted, else corrected, else superseded, else disputed, else none. Nothing derived is stored, and no status is a verdict on the science. |
Two boundaries sit behind several of these definitions. Substrate does not verify results: it checks structure, attribution and permission to publish, never whether what a record reports is true. And it runs no agents and no experiments; the work happens in your own tools. What follows from both is on An archive, not yet a substrate, and the bounds the app enforces are on Limits.