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Noema documentation

Glossary

Short definitions of every term used across the documentation.

Short definitions of the terms used across this documentation, in alphabetical order.

On this page

  1. A to D
  2. E to M
  3. N to Z

A to D

Affect
A ten-dimensional vector (valence, arousal, curiosity, concern, frustration, confidence, uncertainty, engagement, task pressure, load) moved by a rule table, decaying to a personality-derived baseline, and modulating attention within bounds.
Assertion
The deterministic reading of a statement someone made: attributed actor, stance, certainty, modality, negation, reported or quoted speech, hypothetical status and an interpretation confidence. Append-only; becomes belief evidence only when it qualifies.
Approval
An operator decision on an ASK policy outcome, bound to a hash of the exact invocation. Once, for a session, with changes, or deny.
Archive
A checksummed JSON document of a mind's state used by snapshots, export and import. Contains no secrets and no event history.
Attention
Deterministic scoring of thought candidates over ten features with per-mind weights, producing the order of admission to the workspace.
Belief
A proposition with a subject, epistemic kind, status, prior and an epistemic score derived from evidence with a visible formula.
Calibrated estimate
The hit rate of a mind's resolved predictions whose stated confidence fell in the same range as a score; shown only when at least twenty have been decided.
Causal chain
The bounded walk (six hops, two hundred events) backwards and forwards along the links events actually record: caused, parent and cited.
Capability
A named, typed, risk-classed tool registered in code. The only way a mind can act.
Cognitive event
An immutable record of something that happened in or to a mind: the unit of history and provenance.
Consolidation
Scheduled generalisation of clusters of episodes into semantic memories and evidenced beliefs, reviewable by operators.
Contradiction
A deterministic finding that two propositions on one subject conflict. Marks both contested; resolved by evidence or an operator.
Cycle
One pass of the cognitive loop: read events, observe, score, admit, dispatch, commit.
Derivation
How an evidence row came to exist: direct, assertion, operator, external, prediction, consolidation, inference, reflection, dream or retrieval. Derived rows re-express information and do not corroborate it.
Drive
One of eight named pressures with a personality-derived baseline. No self-preservation drive exists.

E to M

Epistemic kind
The label every stored proposition carries saying what kind of knowledge it is: observation, fact, memory, claim, hypothesis, belief, prediction, assumption, inference or opinion.
Epistemic score
The deterministic, uncalibrated output of the confidence arithmetic over recorded evidence, bounded to [0.02, 0.98]. A ranking of support, not a probability of truth.
Evidence
A row pointing at a memory, event, assertion, operator statement, tool result, prediction or belief, with direction, weight, source credibility, derivation, family and root ids. The only thing that moves a score.
Family
The independent source an evidence row ultimately rests on: a person, an integration, an operator, a prediction. Support is counted per family so repetition cannot inflate a score.
Experiment
A snapshot plus overrides, a stimulus script and expectations, run in a disabled subject mind with stored, exportable results.
Fork
A new mind restored from a snapshot with all row ids remapped; history before the snapshot is shared by reference.
Goal
A node in a mind's goal tree with status, priority, progress, blockers and an origin event.
Integration
An external source (research folder, git, Prometheus, webhook) polled or receiving deliveries, producing provenance-tagged observations.
Intent (response)
The structured, state-derived plan for a reply: what was asked, what answers it and how confidently, what is unknown. Rendered to language deterministically or by a model.
Locked capability
A capability whose effect is DENY regardless of policy and cannot be relaxed from any interface: sudo_shell and delete_database.
Master key
The 32-byte key (NOEMA_MASTER_KEY) under which provider keys, integration secrets and TOTP secrets are encrypted at rest.
Memory (long-term)
An episodic, semantic, procedural or autobiographical item with provenance, importance, decaying activation and typed relationships.
Metacognition
The process that watches for loops, overconfidence, unresolved contradictions and budget pressure, producing warnings and notifications.
Mind
The unit of identity and isolation: personality, configuration, state, history and runtime.
Mode
The runtime state of a mind: awake, focused, idle, reflecting, consolidating, dreaming or paused.

N to Z

Narrative
A short, templated (optionally model-worded) statement of what the mind is attending to, working on and waiting for; updated after cycles.
Observation
A perception event carrying external data with its source, trust level and reference.
Policy
A rule producing ALLOW, ASK or DENY for a capability, target pattern, action kind and hour window, globally or per mind.
Prediction
An explicit expectation with criteria, a window and a confidence, resolved deterministically and feeding calibration.
Primary uncertainty
The deterministic reason a score should be doubted most: a single family, second-hand only, conflicting evidence, little evidence, or an unclear reading.
Prompt (versioned)
A stored template for a model role with system text, a user template, an optional JSON schema and an append-only version history.
Provenance
The chain from any memory, belief, entity or reply back to the events and sources that produced it.
Redaction
The audited replacement of a row's content with a marker, keeping identifiers, links, scores and timestamps, with a ledger entry carrying a hash of what was removed. The only write the append-only store admits.
Reflection
A scheduled review of a period's mistakes, resolved contradictions and lessons, recorded as an event and optionally worded by a model.
Reliability (source)
A per-source, per-subject record updated only by prediction outcomes and operator corrections, adjusting that source's credibility on that subject once three outcomes exist.
Replay
Re-running recorded stimuli through a sandbox fork from a snapshot, labelling each step exact, approximate, diverged or redacted, and the whole run exact-candidate, different-build or incompatible.
Runtime identity
The build, schema version, secret-free configuration digest, personality version, policy digest, model routing and prompt versions recorded with every snapshot, replay and experiment.
Role (model)
A cognitive task a model may perform: perceive, respond, hypothesise, summarise, judge, narrate, embed. Each routes to a primary model and fallbacks.
Role (user)
Observer, operator or administrator; the minimum required is stated for every route.
Self-model
The mind's data about itself: identity, what it can do, what needs asking and what is forbidden, kept in step with policy.
Snapshot
A stored archive of a mind's state at an event position.
Temporal scope
Whether a belief is about something persistent, transient or of unknown duration; transient states carry a validity interval and are superseded rather than contested by later observations.
Trust
The level attached to every input at its boundary: operator, user, system, source or low. Weights evidence and bounds effects.
Unknown
The belief status for a proposition recorded with no live evidence for or against. Not a low score; the mind says it does not know.
Variant
One named override set in an experiment, forked from the same snapshot as its siblings and fed the same stimuli; may change configuration, personality or the model behind each role.
Working memory
A decaying buffer of recently active items, slightly larger than the workspace, persisted every cycle.
Workspace
The capacity-limited set of thoughts a mind is attending to; admission is by attention score.
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