Glossary

Shared vocabulary used across the constellation — terms that mean the same thing in every repo, so the READMEs and contracts don't quietly diverge. System-specific terms stay in that system's repo.

Term	Meaning
the constellation	All the Bitspark repos together — the substance stack, downstream consumers, and the orthogonal infrastructure (design, atlas).
substance stack	The Greek-named systems that build on one another (six today), floor to top: ontos → logos → horos → thesmos → stele → arche.
downstream	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).
orthogonal infrastructure	A plain-named repo that cuts across the stack rather than sitting in it — design (surface) and atlas (structure).
the axiom	The one sanctioned filled shape in a system's mark — its model's anchor. (Defined fully in design.)
account	A re-checkable artifact produced by reasoning (logos): an answer paired with the derivation that earns it.
attestation	A signed fact admitted to the record (arche / stele).
draft member	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.
admissible	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. (theory/0001)
substrate theory	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. The inquiry into which theories must exist lives in atlas/theory/. (ADR 0012)
primitive	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. (arche RFC 0001)
vocabulary	Predicates and descriptors a population agrees to use — the cheapest tier, where most concepts start and should stay.
profile / interface	A concrete contract for a surface: operations, DTOs, an authority mapping, conformance vectors. (arche RFC 0002)
capability	Candidate theory. What an entity affords and requires — provides / requires / operation — the integration surface that lets an unknown future participant bind to it. Placeholder: dynamis. (theory/0003 · ADR 0013)
realization	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". Placeholder: energeia. (theory/0003 · ADR 0013)
late-bound use	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. (theory/0001)
search / check split	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. (logos; stele admission)

This is a stub seeded from the systems' READMEs. Add a term when it first needs to mean the same thing in two repos.