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Concepts

Glossary

Canonical definitions for Domain, Mesh, Scope, Verdict, and related terms.

Definitions below are transcribed from CONTEXT.md, the sole canonical glossary for the registry, proposal/scope, and trust vocabularies. See the source file for full context and “Avoid” guidance on each term.

  • Domain — “An identity-bearing entity defined by exactly ONE curated Domain Boundary (hashable). Usually geographic (WNAT, Kansas), but a synthetic outline (UnitSquare) is equally a Domain — category records which.”
  • Collection — “A curated, non-identity-bearing grouping of Meshes under one name (TestCases, Shapes, MiscTests). Has no Domain Boundary and no Identity hash — that is precisely what distinguishes it from a Domain.”
  • Alias (of a Domain) — “A Maintainer-declared equivalence between hash-distinct Domains that denote the same place… Only the Maintainer creates Aliases — the algorithm surfaces candidates via Relatedness, never declares equivalence. Hashes are never mutated; aliasing is metadata.”
  • Continent (manifest key continent) — “The coarse browse label on a Domain (“Europe”, “North America”, “Atlantic Ocean”).”
  • Mesh / Mesh Record — “A discretization of a Domain. One Domain has zero-or-more Meshes… Identity is per-discretization, not per-Domain.” The Mesh Record is “the Registry entry for a Mesh in the Manifest. Bears its own identity (Mesh.content_uid, sha256-v1 over canonical .14 bytes). Distinct from the in-memory CHILmesh runtime object that CHILmesh loads.”
  • Domain Boundary — “The SME-curated outline (coastline + open-ocean cuts) that defines what the Domain IS. Identity-bearing. Stored as a first-class field separate from mesh elements.”
  • Mesh Boundary — “The geometric outline of a Mesh's elements; auto-derivable from element connectivity. Not identity-bearing for the Domain.”
  • Boundary Segment — “ADCIRC's own file-format concept: the open/land boundary strings (boundary conditions) in a fort.14 file. Neither Mesh Boundary nor Domain Boundary — a third, format-level thing.”
  • Identity (of a Domain) — “Deterministic hash over the Canonical form of the Domain Boundary. Two Domains are the same iff their canonical bytes hash equal. No thresholds, no predictions, no human review.”
  • Canonical form (of a Domain) — “The byte representation produced by: (1) coordinates in a declared CRS, (2) quantized to a declared grid (e.g. 1e-7 degrees), (3) Domain Boundary curve in canonical winding direction from a canonical start vertex (westmost-then-southernmost). Hash of canonical form == Identity.”
  • Containment (Domain ⊂ Domain) — “Deterministic geometric check: d1's Domain Boundary polygon lies entirely inside d2's Domain Boundary polygon under a shared CRS. Returns boolean. No fuzzy threshold.”
  • Relatedness (of two Domains) — “A scored composite that surfaces candidate-related Domains to a browsing human… Never used by the registry to merge or deduplicate entries. Lives in browse/compare UI, not in identity logic.”
  • Region — “Reserved exclusively for the proposal/scope subsystem: a polygon selection over a Mesh in the planning→enforcement lifecycle. Never bare — always qualified.”
  • Candidate Proposal (RegionProposal) — the non-authoritative form of a Region, per the qualifier rule: always qualified as “Candidate Proposal (RegionProposal, non-authoritative)… or region polygon (the geometry itself).”
  • Approved Region (ApprovedRegion) — the authoritative form of a Region, per the qualifier rule: “Approved Region (ApprovedRegion, authoritative after the human approval gate)… A Region is geometry; the authority question is Scope.”
  • Scope — “The permission envelope of a proposed change — what it is allowed to touch. Scope is checked AGAINST an Approved Region by the deterministic verdict (check_scope_against_region); Region is the geometry, Scope is the authority bound to it. L1 verdict = declared scope only (advisory); L2 verdict = bound to an Approved Region (authoritative).”
  • Verdict — “The deterministic outcome of checking Scope against an Approved Region (or, at L1, against declared scope only). A Verdict is computed, never opined.”
  • Ruleset — “The versioned, tamper-evident set of rules behind a Verdict.”
  • Gate — “A structural validation step with pass/fail status (boundary-closure gate, area-ratio gate, model-completeness gate). “Check” survives ONLY as a verb (“check scope against region”), never as a noun — “the checks” → “the gates”.”
  • Maintainer — “The human authority (currently Dominik, Thomas, Ethan) who reviews submissions, decides Domain assignments, sets Domain metadata, declares Aliases, and approves Region proposals. The algorithm produces booleans (Identity, Containment) and candidates (Relatedness); the Maintainer decides outcomes.”
  • Provenance — “Where an artifact came from plus its chain of custody (contributor, upstream URL, verification).”
  • Authoritative — “The property of a signal the system stakes trust on — deterministic and binding (an Approved Region, an L2 Verdict), as opposed to advisory (proposals, rankings, L1).”
  • Mesh Fitness — “How solver-ready a Mesh is for downstream numerical modeling (DG-SWEM, SWAN), derived from the mesh alone without running a solver — a vector of numerical-health measures reduced to a scalar by its binding (worst) constraint. A screening proxy, never a guarantee of a successful run.”