Glossary

Plain definitions for the 181 terms used across Teleon pages, so every headline can use plain words and every page can link here.

.1 term

.cwasm: Precompiled WebAssembly: a module compiled ahead of time, so it starts fast and runs at native speed in the sandbox.

11 term

13F: The quarterly SEC report in which large institutional investment managers list their holdings of US-listed securities.

31 term

311 request: A non-emergency service request to a city, such as a pothole, logged with its type, place and dates.

A9 terms

Access ring: One of four access levels. RING-0 is internal operations, RING-1 operators, RING-2 keyed agents and sites, RING-3 public reads.
Active inference: A theory of action in which an agent picks the policy with the lowest expected free energy.
Agent card: A JSON file at /.well-known/agent-card.json that tells an agent who runs a service, what it offers and how to call it.
AIS: Automatic Identification System: radio messages that ships broadcast with their identity, position, course and speed.
Alice test: The two-step test from the 2014 Alice decision that US courts apply under section 101 of the Patent Act to decide whether a claim is directed to an abstract idea.
Alpha-cut: A threshold on a continuous score. Items above the cut join a bitmap, so filters stay fast while scores stay continuous.
Anti-pattern: A common design that seems reasonable and causes trouble at scale. Each one here comes with a tested cure.
ArchPatternIR: The executable form of an architecture pattern: its components, connections and settings, ready to instantiate and test.
Autonomy dial: A setting from level 1 to level 4 that decides how much of a department's work runs on its own.

B11 terms

Baton: The hand-off between queues: when one step finishes, its output becomes the next queue's input row.
BGP: Border Gateway Protocol: how networks announce the address ranges they can reach. Route changes reveal new networks, moves and hijacks.
Bill of lading: The shipping document for a cargo: it names the shipper, the consignee, the goods and the vessel.
Bill of materials: The list of parts inside a product. Tier 1 suppliers sell to the maker, tier 2 suppliers sell to tier 1, and so on down the chain.
Bitemporal: A record that keeps two times: when a fact was true in the world and when the system learned it.
BM25F: A ranking formula for keyword search that weighs matches by field, so a title match counts more than a body match.
BOM: Bill of materials: the parts in a product and their quantities, used here to estimate its build cost.
Boundary tier: One of three action tiers for agents: actions they always take, actions that ask a person first, and a fixed list of prohibited actions.
Breaking change: A release that changes a library's public interface, so code written for the earlier version needs edits.
Brier score: The mean squared error of probability forecasts. Lower is better, and a perfect forecaster scores 0.
Byte-range read: An HTTP request for part of a file (status 206), so an agent fetches exactly the bytes it needs.

C21 terms

Canary: A small share of traffic or checks run against a change first, so a problem shows up early and stays small.
Capability card: A short description of what a component does, its typed inputs and outputs and its license, sized for an agent's context.
Capability firewall: Object-capability security for runs: code reaches only the handles it is given, such as one folder or one API.
CAS: Content-addressed storage: every file is stored and fetched by a hash of its bytes, so identical bytes are kept once.
Cassette: A recording of every state change in order, replayed to rebuild any earlier moment exactly.
Catalyst: A dated event that can move a company's value, such as an FDA decision, a contract award or a court ruling.
Catch-all intake: A schema-free inbox for new kinds of work. Shapes that keep recurring graduate into dedicated queues.
Causal DAG: A one-way graph of tasks joined by cause and effect, so you can trace why each task exists and what it unblocks.
CELF: Cost-effective lazy forward selection: a greedy pick of the reads that add the most new coverage per unit of cost.
Certificate transparency: Public, append-only logs of issued TLS certificates, so new domains and subdomains can be watched as their certificates appear.
Change cursor: A position in a feed's change stream. A reader sends the last cursor it saw and gets every change after it, in order.
Chokepoint: A step in a supply chain that very few suppliers perform, such as advanced chip packaging, so a disruption there reaches many products.
Circuit breaker: A switch per lane that pauses calls to a failing dependency and retries carefully once it recovers.
CloudEvents: An open standard envelope for event data, so feeds from different sources share one shape.
Confidence ellipse: The region where a system's true position on a lens most likely lies, given the evidence behind its scores.
Contract: A versioned agreement on the shape of a request and response, so either side can change behind it safely.
CoT audit: A check that a model's written reasoning matches the evidence it cites and the answer it gives.
CPOP: Cross-provider pairing: the model family that checks a result differs from the one that made it.
Cursor: A position in a feed's change log. Reading since a cursor returns everything newer, in order.
CUSUM: Cumulative sum control: adds up small deviations from a target, so a slow, steady shift is caught early.
CVE: Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures: the public list of known security flaws, each with an ID in the form CVE-year-number.

D8 terms

DAG: A directed acyclic graph: steps joined by one-way edges, so work flows forward in a known order.
Defect cluster: A group of recalls, complaints or court filings that share a component and a failure mode.
Deterministic check: A check written as code that gives the same answer every time for the same input, at code speed and cost.
Docket: The running list of filings in a court case, each with its number and date.
DOI: Digital Object Identifier: a permanent ID for a paper, book or dataset that resolves to its current home.
Double-entry ledger: Every movement is written twice, as a debit and a matching credit, so the books always balance.
DRC: Design rule check: confirms a layout meets the foundry's spacing, width and density rules.
Drift: A slow change in inputs or results over time, caught by comparing today's readings with a baseline.

E7 terms

Edge: Servers close to the reader that answer requests quickly and pass the rest to the origin.
Egress: Data leaving a cloud network, usually billed per gigabyte.
Embedding: A list of numbers that places text, code or images in a space where similar things sit close together.
Entity resolution: Deciding which records from different sources describe the same company. Splink scores each candidate pair with a probabilistic match model.
EVOI: Expected value of information: how much a fresh read is likely to improve a decision. Higher EVOI, more frequent reads.
Execution mode: One of 12 ways to run a task, MODE_1A to MODE_8, from code only to full agentic model work.
Expected free energy: G(pi), a policy's score: expected risk, the distance from preferred outcomes, plus expected ambiguity. Lower is better.

F11 terms

FAERS: The FDA Adverse Event Reporting System: reports of side effects and medication errors filed after a drug reaches the market.
FastCDC: Content-defined chunking: files split at points chosen by their bytes, so a small edit changes few chunks.
FCC ID: The ID on radio equipment authorized by the US FCC: a grantee code plus a product code, with a public filing.
FDTD: Finite-difference time-domain simulation: steps Maxwell's equations through time on a grid to show how light travels.
Fencing token: A number that grows with every new lease, so a write from an older lease holder is refused safely.
Fiduciary gate: A check that guards money, secrets or trust before work is accepted.
Form 4: The SEC filing in which a company insider, such as an officer, director or large holder, reports a trade in the company's shares.
Form 990: The annual return US tax-exempt organizations file with the IRS; foundations file Form 990-PF, which lists grants paid.
Format-preserving encryption: Encryption whose output keeps the input's shape, so a nine-digit ID becomes another nine-digit ID. Teleon uses the NIST FF1 mode.
Forward citation: A later patent or application that cites an earlier one. Patents with many forward citations tend to be influential.
Futarchy: Deciding with markets: each option is priced by what forecasters expect it to do for a measured goal.

G8 terms

Gamma exposure: GEX: an estimate of how much options dealers must buy or sell as the underlying moves, summed from open interest and each contract's gamma.
GDSII: The standard file format for a chip's final layout geometry, the file a foundry builds from.
Gerber: The standard file set that describes each layer of a printed circuit board for fabrication.
Gold control: A test item whose correct answer is known, mixed into real work to measure accuracy honestly.
Gravity Ratchet: The rule that moves each workload to a cheaper execution mode once that mode proves reliable for it.
Greeks: Measures of how an option's price responds to the underlying price (delta and gamma), time (theta), volatility (vega) and interest rates (rho).
Ground truth: Observed data, such as shipments, vessel positions or satellite readings, used to check a stated claim.
GTFS-RT: GTFS Realtime: the standard feed format for transit trip updates, vehicle positions and service alerts.

H7 terms

H3: An open hexagonal grid that divides the globe into cells at 16 resolutions, so places can be grouped and joined by cell ID.
Handshake: The first call a site or agent makes to agree on API version and settings for everything that follows.
Harm veto: A hard stop: one persona can halt a plan that crosses a harm limit, whatever its index score.
Hash ring: A circle of hash values where each worker owns an arc, so work spreads evenly and moves little when workers change.
Holdout: Test data kept apart from training and tuning, so scores on it show real performance.
HTS: Harmonized Tariff Schedule: the code list that sets the duty rate for each kind of imported good, revised as rates change.
Hyperedge: A link that joins more than two things at once, such as a paper, its code, its dataset and its authors.

I3 terms

IATI: The International Aid Transparency Initiative standard for publishing aid and humanitarian spending, activity by activity.
Idempotent: Safe to repeat: running the same request twice leaves the same result as running it once.
Interconnection queue: A grid operator's ordered list of projects waiting for studies and approval to connect, such as power plants, batteries and large loads like datacenters.

J1 term

Jagged frontier: The uneven edge of what models do well: strong on some tasks, weak on close neighbours.

K4 terms

k-anonymity: A privacy floor: each released record shares its identifying fields with at least k minus 1 others, so any one person sits in a group of k or more.
Keyed watch: A standing request made with an API key that names what to follow and delivers each matching change.
KL surprise: How far a new reading shifts a source's expected values, measured as Kullback-Leibler divergence.
Kleisli wrapper: A thin layer that wraps a call with one concern, such as clamping inputs or scrubbing secrets, and composes with others.

L10 terms

L0, L1, L2: Three levels of detail for a capability: a short card, the typed contract, then exact source bytes.
Lane: A path through the queues for one kind of contribution, such as describing files or solving problems.
LCA: Labor Condition Application: the filing an employer makes with the US Department of Labor before hiring on an H-1B visa, including the wage offered.
LDA: Lobbying Disclosure Act filings: registrations and quarterly reports naming clients, issues and bills lobbied.
Lean 4: A programming language and proof assistant whose small kernel checks every step of every proof.
Lease: A time-limited claim on a task. The worker holding the lease finishes it or the lease expires and the task returns.
Lens: A pair of functions that translate a request or response between two schema versions in both directions.
LMP: Locational marginal price: the wholesale price of electricity at one grid node, made up of energy, congestion and loss components.
LMSR: Logarithmic market scoring rule: an automated market maker that always quotes a price for each outcome. Prices read as probabilities.
LSH: Locality-sensitive hashing: near-duplicate items land in the same bucket, so similar things are found fast.

M8 terms

Markup: A committee session where members amend a bill and vote to report it to the full chamber.
MaxSMT: Maximum satisfiability modulo theories: a solver keeps every hard rule and satisfies as much of the weighted soft rules as it can.
MCP: Model Context Protocol: an open standard for connecting agents to tools and data.
Merkle tree: A tree of hashes where each parent hashes its children, so one root hash proves every part is intact.
Micro-agent: A small deterministic program for one kind of task. It finishes the task itself or rides along with a claimed task as a recommended tool.
MinHash: A compact signature for estimating how much two sets overlap, used to find near-duplicates.
Monte Carlo analysis: Many simulations with randomly varied parameters, used to estimate yield and spread.
mp ID: The Materials Project's ID for a computed material, such as mp-149 for silicon.

N4 terms

Narrative velocity: How fast coverage of one event grows across distinct sources, measured after duplicate stories are merged.
Neuro-symbolic: Combining learned models with explicit rules and logic, so predictions respect known constraints.
Night lights: Nighttime light readings from the VIIRS day/night band, which rise and fall with activity at a site.
NLRB case: A matter before the US National Labor Relations Board: a representation petition or an unfair labor practice charge.

O6 terms

O*NET: The US Department of Labor's database of occupations, with the tasks, skills and tools of each. O*NET drift tracks how postings move away from those profiles.
Obsoletes and updates: Links in the RFC index: a newer RFC obsoletes the one it replaces and updates one it amends.
OKF: The schema-free record format at the first rung of the schema ladder, used for catch-all items.
OPRA: The Options Price Reporting Authority, which consolidates quotes and trades from the US options exchanges into one feed. Its data comes with its own terms.
Optical interposer: A layer under side-by-side chips that carries signals between them as light, through waveguides.
Ownership chain: The sequence of holding companies between a titled owner, such as an LLC on a deed, and the parent company that controls it.

P18 terms

Pareto frontier: The set of options where improving one measure, such as cost, would worsen another, such as quality.
Partition: One slice of a large table, chosen by a key such as site or queue, so reads and writes stay fast.
pass@k: The share of tasks solved at least once in k tries.
Patent family: All the filings that protect one invention across patent offices, such as a US patent, a European patent and a WIPO application.
PAVA: Pool adjacent violators: the standard way to turn raw scores into calibrated probabilities that only go up.
PDB ID: The four-character code for an entry in the Protein Data Bank, such as 4HHB for human deoxyhemoglobin.
PDUFA date: The goal date by which the FDA aims to act on a drug or biologic application, set under the Prescription Drug User Fee Act.
PID controller: A feedback controller that sets its next move from the current gap, the gap's running total and its rate of change, each weighted by a gain.
Pod: A small team of agent roles that owns one component: it builds, checks and repairs it together.
Preprint: A research paper posted publicly ahead of journal publication.
Preset promotion: Turning parameter settings a model found by trial into fixed presets that deterministic code reuses at code cost.
PrioritizedExtensibleList: Teleon's ordered evaluation record. Each item carries a priority, verdict, probability, strength and confidence, each on a 0 to 100 scale.
Procrustes bridge: A rotation that maps one embedding space onto another, so a new model can read an old index.
Progressive disclosure: Showing an agent a short summary first and the full detail only when it asks, to save context.
Proof certificate: A small file that lets a checker confirm a result is correct far faster than redoing the work.
Proof-carrying code: Code shipped with a machine-checkable proof of its properties, which the loader checks before the code runs.
purl: A standard ID for a library and its version that reads the same across registries, such as pkg:pypi/name@1.0.
PVT corners: Combinations of process, voltage and temperature extremes that a circuit must work across.

Q1 term

Quadrant lens: A two-axis view that places each system by vision and execution, with a confidence ellipse around each point.

R8 terms

Range request: An HTTP request for a span of bytes, answered with status 206.
Read time: When Teleon fetched a record from its source. It sits beside the source's own dates, so readers can judge how fresh each record is.
Record license: The terms that came with a record from its source, stored on the record itself so every reader sees them.
ReproZip: A tool that traces a program's run and bundles the files, libraries and settings it used, so the run replays elsewhere.
Rollout: One simulated run forward from a starting state through a proposed step, used to check the predicted outcome.
Royalty split: The share of credit or payment each contributor earns, written in basis points (1 bp is 0.01 percent).
RTL: Register-transfer level: a hardware description, in a language such as Verilog, of how data moves between registers each clock cycle.
Rubric: An ordered list of criteria for grading work. Knockout criteria must pass before the rest count.

S20 terms

Sanctions list: A government list of people, companies and vessels under sanctions, such as asset freezes or trade limits.
SAR: Synthetic aperture radar: a satellite radar that images the ground day and night, through cloud.
SBIR: Small Business Innovation Research: US federal funding for small firms in phases, from Phase I feasibility awards to Phase III follow-on contracts.
SCD Type 2: A history-keeping table design: each change adds a row with its valid-from and valid-to dates.
Schulze method: A ranked-choice voting method that picks the option a majority prefers in head-to-head comparisons.
Section 337: The US trade law under which the International Trade Commission investigates imports that infringe US patents and can bar them at the border.
Section 363 sale: A court-approved sale of a debtor's assets under section 363 of the US Bankruptcy Code, often by auction.
Separation logic: A logic for programs that share memory: each proof covers the resources a piece of code owns, so proofs compose.
Setpoint: The target value a controller steers a measure toward. BotFabric keeps one per KPI, with the current reading beside it.
SimHash: A short fingerprint of a document where similar documents get similar fingerprints.
SingleFlight: Request coalescing: when many callers ask for the same missing item at once, one fetch runs and every caller shares its result.
Sister track: The improvement track that runs beside each database: it tunes priorities, synonyms and steps behind holdout checks.
SKOS: A W3C standard for vocabularies: preferred labels, synonyms and broader and narrower terms.
SLSA: Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts: signed provenance that records how an artifact was built and from which inputs.
Soft rule: A rule at level 4 or 5 of the hierarchy. An agent may bend it by filing a receipt with the slack used, the penalty and a compensating guard.
SPC chart: A statistical process control chart: a running measure with limits that flag unusual change.
Spot price: The current price for something bought for immediate use, such as a machine at auction or a GPU hour.
SPRT: Sequential probability ratio test: weighs the evidence after each observation and stops as soon as the answer is clear.
Swanson ABC bridge: A discovery link: when A connects to B in one source and B to C in another, A and C become a lead.
SWHID: Software Heritage identifier: a permanent ID made from a file's hash, such as swh:1:cnt: followed by 40 hex digits.

T2 terms

THP: Teleon Handshake Protocol: how a site or agent negotiates API version and parameters with the backend.
Trigram index: An index of every three-character sequence, so substring and typo-tolerant search stays fast.

U1 term

UCC-1: A state filing that records a lender's claim on a borrower's property. It lasts five years; a continuation extends it.

V1 term

VIN: Vehicle identification number: the 17-character code that identifies a road vehicle, its maker and its model year.

W6 terms

WARN notice: Advance notice that a US employer files with the state before a plant closing or mass layoff, as the WARN Act requires.
Wasm sandbox: WebAssembly runtime with fuel metering and closed network access, used to run untrusted code safely.
Waveguide: A structure that confines light and guides it along a path on a photonic chip.
Welfare index: One score for how a plan treats everyone it affects. The Rawlsian-Nash form puts the worst-off group first and rewards balanced gains.
World model: A model that predicts how a system's state changes after an action, used here to preview a step before it runs.
WORM: Write once, read many: storage that keeps backups exactly as written, for clean restores.

X2 terms

XBRL: eXtensible Business Reporting Language: the tagged format of financial statements filed with the SEC, so each figure and footnote compares across filings.
XFetch: Probabilistic early recomputation: a cached item refreshes shortly before it expires, so refreshes spread out and misses stay rare.

Z1 term

Zombie lease: A lease whose worker has stopped responding. The reaper reclaims it so the task can run again.