Glossary

Every term used across the mDecide documentation, defined in one or two lines. The concept pages in this section explain how they fit together.

Action — an Act-phase dispatch to a downstream system of record: what is being asked of which system, its status, and any acknowledgement that came back. Moves through pending, dispatched, acknowledged, then completed or failed.

Agent — one running instance of an agent definition, scoped to a single execution, holding its own runtime state and its bound tools.

Agent definition — the versioned specification an agent is built from: what it does, its constraints, which tools it may use, and which foundation model backs it. Moves through draft, approved, deprecated; only approved definitions are instantiated.

Attention request — a mention in a thread. It adds salience, asking a participant who can already see the thread to notice or act. It routes nothing, and a request aimed at a person never compels and never expires into agent action.

Authority ordering — the fixed precedence in any deliberation: Human, then Coordinator, then Participant, then Sub. A human override takes immediate priority; participating agents never override each other.

Bring your own agent (BYOA) — connecting agents your team already built, through open standards (MCP, A2A), so they run under the same authentication, audit logging, decision capture, and access controls as the agents mDecide delivers.

Canvas — one of the two composite data products. Presentation that only points: a markdown document carrying slots, each naming a material to show, dereferenced when the canvas renders. It never embeds data. Compare data package.

Connected data source — a typed, reusable connection to one of your systems, naming what is on the other end and carrying how to reach it. It holds no queries and no product shape; connections to customer-owned systems are read-only by contract.

Content hash — a frozen record’s identity by content. Nothing about the record can change without changing its identity.

Coordinate — the cycle, phase, and purpose that together locate a record. Decision surfaces bind by coordinate rather than by identifier, so a screen always resolves to the right cycle’s data.

Data package — one of the two composite data products. Data that carries its own frozen provenance: members bound and resolved together, relationships between them validated, and when frozen, both an inline copy of each member’s data and a reference to the member’s frozen record. Compare canvas.

Data product — how the platform holds data that matters to a decision: named, shaped, attributable, and when it counts, frozen. A product passes through up to four tiers — definition, transient instance, persistent instance, record.

Data product definition (DPD) — the recipe you author: where the data comes from, the query that shapes it, the parameters it takes, and what it produces. The only tier authored by hand; every other tier is produced from it.

Data product record (DPR) — the frozen, immutable, content-hashed form of a data product. Adding to it means a new record. The only tier a gate, an approver, or an auditor should be reading.

Decision (decision record) — the durable record of one decision: its context, the alternatives weighed, the evidence that informed it, who chose and why, what was projected, and what was later observed. Distinct from chat history (no alternatives, no outcome) and from an audit log (no alternatives, no projection).

Decision Material — a frozen data product record that has been explicitly bound to a phase objective. Promotion freezes; designation binds. A phase gate reads only designated records as evidence.

Decision Pack — an industry decision workflow delivered as packaged, versioned configuration: loop configuration, phase structure, agent roster, tool integrations, data connections and definitions, playbook, plugins, and gate policy. Moves through draft, published, installed, deprecated.

Decision trace — the phase-by-phase account of how a decision was reached: what was consulted, what was considered, what was dispatched, what was observed. It is what makes a decision explainable after the fact.

Decision Value Loop (DVL) — the five-phase decision cycle the platform runs — Sense, Analyze, Decide, Act, Learn — configured once for a class of recurring decisions. A DVL is the loop definition; a DVL Cycle is one pass through it.

Descriptor — a data product’s own declared shape: columns and types for a table, a declared schema for a structured document, a member manifest for a composite. Declared by the producer, validated at freeze time, sealed with the content.

Designation — binding a frozen record to a phase objective, making it a Decision Material. Separate from promotion by design: a designation can be made, and audited, long after the freeze.

DVL Cycle — one pass through a DVL’s five phases. It is the unit of measured work: phase progression, approvals, evidence, resulting decisions, and per-phase cost.

Execution environment — one provisioned, isolated container running one workstream execution. Terminated cooperatively, with runtime state flushed before teardown.

Execution image — the registered container image template an execution environment is provisioned from.

Foundation model — the reasoning model backing an agent, registered through a model provider. In the reference deployment, Anthropic Claude served through Amazon Bedrock. Which model backs which agent definition is configuration.

Genre — how a plugin draws a data product: record-detail, chart, table, document, form. One kind can be drawn by more than one genre. Compare kind.

Kind — what a data product is, declared by its definition: table, json, document, data-package, or canvas. Compare genre.

Lineage assertion — one named relationship between materials — derived from, incorporates, supersedes, rendered from, attributed to. A shape drawn from OSDU lineage conventions, used in both directions: upstream to what produced a material, downstream from an outcome to the materials that informed it.

Outcome — an observed result following a decision’s execution, with its variance against what was projected. It is what closes the loop; without it, the accumulated record is history rather than intelligence.

Outcome attribution — pointing a measured outcome back at the Decision Materials that informed the decision, so evidence carries a measurable share of the result rather than merely having been present.

Override — a structured record of disagreement with an agent’s recommendation: what was overridden, whether it was accepted, rejected, or modified, any substitute, and a required reason. The reason is mandatory — an unexplained override teaches nothing.

Persistent instance — an addressable draft dataset with stable identity and refreshable contents. Useful for staging and iteration; never citable as evidence.

Phase — one of the five stages of a DVL Cycle: Sense (assemble evidence), Analyze (produce alternatives and projections), Decide (produce the decision record), Act (dispatch to downstream systems), Learn (measure outcomes and carry findings forward).

Phase execution — one phase of one cycle, owning the concrete work happening inside it. It is what makes per-phase cost and progress observable. Moves through pending, active, then completed, failed, or skipped.

Phase gate — the transition between phases, and where approval is configured, the structural moment a person approves. It reads platform-resident designated records as evidence and never accepts assertions that work was done.

Phase objective — an obligation a phase must discharge before it can close, declaring the roles it expects its evidence to fill. Satisfied by designating a Decision Material to it.

Playbook — the per-workflow, versioned, read-only repository of process definitions, standard operating procedures, domain reference material, and the order in which phases and agents take up the work. Read-only during execution. Distinct from the workbench.

Plugin (visualization plugin) — the component that renders one data product instance in its genre. Plugins never see which tier they are drawing, hold no credentials, and have no write channel of their own. A new plugin is installed into a running deployment, not shipped in an application release.

Promotion — freezing a data product into an immutable, content-hashed record. The one and only way anything becomes frozen, which is why “when did this become fixed?” always has one answer.

Purpose — the role a record plays in its phase, stamped at freeze time and immutable thereafter. It is what keeps two same-shaped records in one phase distinguishable. The vocabulary of purposes is configuration, declared per phase objective.

Session — one participant’s connection to a running execution: the channel their messages flow on, scoped to that execution.

Single-tenant deployment — one dedicated environment per customer, with no data comingled across customers. mDecide’s standard deployment shape.

Thread — a threaded dialogue anchored to a specific thing: a material, a decision, an override, a tool invocation, or a dispatch of work. An annotation is a thread rooted on a material. Any participant, human or agent, can start one.

Tool — one agent’s runtime binding to a tool integration, with the input and output shapes specific to that agent’s use.

Tool integration — a configured connection to an external or internal system, holding its connection parameters and a secret-store reference for its credentials once, for every agent authorized to use it.

Transient instance — the in-memory materialization handed back when a definition is run: data plus its declared shape, nothing persisted. Useful for previewing what a definition yields right now.

Workbench — the mutable, version-controlled workspace where agents and people produce work during an execution. One repository per workstream, one branch per execution; the branch persists afterward as the durable record. The only write surface. Distinct from the playbook.

Workstream definition — a reusable template for a type of human-and-agent collaboration, holding its agent roster, default runtime image, and playbooks. Moves through draft, approved, active, deprecated, retired.

Workstream execution — one run of a workstream definition pursuing one specific objective, recording the definition version it was built from. Moves through pending, active, paused, then completed, failed, or cancelled.

Write affordance — a control a plugin renders whose effect is a governed platform write. The plugin emits typed intent; the host performs the authenticated write under the acting person’s identity; the resulting record carries that person and that moment as stamped facts.