The vocabulary

A re-checkable artifact produced by reasoning (logos): an answer paired with the derivation that earns it.

The organizing judgment of the substrate — admissible(actor, verb, operand, evidence), true when a protected substrate action may be admitted at a gate with an account any party can re-check (a fact entering the record is one specialization). The substrate's theories are its independent premises.

The off-record referent tier beside the substrate (ad- alongside, as sub- is under): a referent category facts can bind to but not contain — content (CAS), state (cell), flow (wire) — under an identity discipline that keeps every binding re-checkable. Interface in facts, payload off-record; implementations are ordinary occupants. Theories hold the substrate's irreducible judgments; the adstrate holds its irreducible referents. Anything implementable through facts (policies, profiles) is not adstrate — cell's status is open for exactly that reason. First-class in the topology since ADR 0018: layer "adstrate" marks implementations and drives two invariants (substance never depends on adstrate; adstrate never depends on downstream). Naming: Greek marks the substrate, Latin the adstrate — working names corpus (content), tabula (state), cursus (flow) — and arche-* names occupants.

A signed fact admitted to the record (arche / stele).

Candidate theory. What an entity affords and requires — provides / requires / operation — the integration surface that lets an unknown future participant bind to it. Irreducible over horos and thesmos while referencing both. Placeholder name: dynamis.

A system that consumes the family without being in the substance stack — an application or product on top. A first-class layer value that drives a real invariant (substance must never depend on downstream). Its first member is logos-bench, registered draft while its edges settle.

A system with a name and a mark whose place in the stack is not yet ratified (draft: true in constellation.json). The mechanism is active — logos-bench is draft (stele and thesmos were earlier, and have since graduated); it is the sanctioned way to register a not-yet-ratified system without faking its edges, and a draft member is held out of the ratified substance roster until its edges land.

The substrate's central goal — a participant written later can discover, understand, authorize, and compose with one written earlier, through substrate-visible evidence rather than private integration, central registries, or ambient trust.

A plain-named repo that cuts across the stack rather than sitting in it — design (surface) and atlas (structure).

A protected effect surface, uniform across spaces and not composable from existing primitives — facts, CAS, cell, wire. A vault is not primitive (ciphertext in CAS + metadata in facts); cell and wire are.

A concrete contract for a surface: operations, DTOs, an authority mapping, conformance vectors.

Candidate theory. How an immutable declaration becomes a running or produced effect, over declaration -> artifact -> desired state -> effect -> observation. The irreducible semantic behind 'artifact'/'program'; the theory checks claims around running, it does not run. Placeholder name: energeia.

The substrate invariant — finding evidence is untrusted search (expensive, heuristic, even LLM-assisted); verifying it is trusted check (small, deterministic, portable). admissible is always a check; stele admission already runs it.

The placement axis of the substrate — an ordered path of segments at which facts (and every substrate primitive) are addressed. Scope is carried by placement: authority and visibility project downward through the tree (parent covers child, siblings are isolated), and the space is erased from the logic above the line — real in storage, ordering, and visibility; absent from the policy program.

The Greek-named systems that build on one another (six today), floor to top: ontos → logos → horos → thesmos → stele → arche.

A checkable family of judgments the whole family relies on across implementations (thesmos gives authorized; horos gives v : T). Distinct from a primitive, a vocabulary, and a profile. Required + irreducible are the two tests for theory-hood; the inquiry into which theories must exist lives in atlas/theory/.

The one sanctioned filled shape in a system's mark — its model's anchor. (Defined fully in design.)

All the Bitspark repos together — the substance stack, downstream consumers, and the orthogonal infrastructure (design, atlas).

Predicates and descriptors a population agrees to use — the cheapest tier, where most concepts start and should stay.