Short definitions of the terms used across this documentation, in alphabetical order. ## 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. 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 a confidence derived from evidence with a visible formula. 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. 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. Evidence : A row pointing at a memory, event, operator statement, tool result or belief, with direction, weight and source credibility. The only thing that moves confidence. 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. 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. Reflection : A scheduled review of a period's mistakes, resolved contradictions and lessons, recorded as an event and optionally worded by a model. Replay : Re-running recorded stimuli through a sandbox fork from a snapshot, labelling each step exact, approximate or diverged. 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. Trust : The level attached to every input at its boundary: operator, user, system, source or low. Weights evidence and bounds effects. 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.