Short definitions for terms that appear throughout the Spectron docs. For deeper treatment, follow the links where provided.
Spectron’s vocabulary is precise, but the intent is everyday: memory that associates related ideas (like hearing “cat” and thinking of pets, lions, or a nickname) and keeps time and scope straight (“I have one” versus “I used to” versus “they weigh about four kilos in general”). The entries below name the machinery; What is Spectron? and Memory categories walk through the human-shaped examples.
A
Anaphora — Pronouns and phrases in conversation that refer back to something said earlier (“he”, “that project”, “the policy we discussed”). Episodic memory keeps the transcript intact; extraction uses context to resolve what they mean.
Attribute — A named property on an entity (for example role = Head of Platform). Attributes can be superseded over time with valid_from / valid_until.
Authoritative (pillar) — Curated, vetted knowledge: handbooks, policies, product catalogues. Usually ingested as documents with higher default trust.
Authority — The policy that curated sources win over casual chat when sources conflict, implemented by the reconciler (often via uncertainty rather than silent overwrite).
C
Calibration (pillar) — Gating assertions by confidence and trust; below a floor, Spectron refuses to overwrite and records uncertainty instead.
Collective (pillar) — Shared memory when multiple principals corroborate the same fact; promotion to wider scope is policy-gated (automated promotion not yet enabled in early preview).
Confidence — The reconciler’s posterior certainty on an assertion (attribute.confidence), stored separately from source trust.
Context (read parameters) — Optional labels, lens, and scope_view on /query and /context to filter or fold results within what your grant already allows. See Contexts and scope.
Consolidation (pillar) — Background process that crystallises recurring observations into longer-lived beliefs.
Context (category) — Short-lived “what matters right now” for the active conversation.
Context (tenant) — A Context is Spectron’s top-level isolation unit: its own database, keys, and configuration. Not the same as the memory category “context”.
D
Decision trace — A graph record of what the reconciler considered, created, or superseded during a write.
Delegation — Acting on behalf of another principal via X-Spectron-On-Behalf-Of, intersected with both parties’ grants (depth 1).
E
Elaboration (pillar) — Background linking of related facts that were stored separately but belong together.
Entity — A typed node in the memory graph (for example Person/alice, Product/airpods_pro).
Episodic (category) — The raw ordered transcript of sessions and turns before extraction.
Experiential (pillar) — Knowledge from conversation and derived passes (turn, reflect, elaboration, …), usually lower default trust than authoritative material.
Extraction — The pipeline that turns text into entities, attributes, relations, instructions, and uncertainties.
F
Forget — Explicit soft-removal of matching memory (valid_until), distinct from aging.
I
Identity (category) — Stable facts about who the principal is (name, role, employer).
Instructions (category) — Behavioural preferences (“use British English”), applied at prompt assembly, not generic retrieval.
K
Graph edge kind — A named structural signal used in document hybrid_graph retrieval (for example knowledge_has_keyword, document_link). Request and response enums reject unknown values with 400 Bad Request.
Known time — When Spectron first recorded a belief; queried with as_of. See Tri-temporal model.
Knowledge (category) — Facts learnt in conversation, distinct from uploaded manuals.
Memory category — On extracted entities, attributes, and relations: identity, knowledge, or context (API-enforced enum).
P
Principal — An actor (human, agent, service) that can be granted read/write permissions on scope paths.
Provenance — Structured metadata on every fact: source kind, reference, span, trust, derivation. See Provenance and traceability.
R
Reconciliation — Comparing new extractions to existing memory: supersede, merge, or emit uncertainty.
Reflection (pillar) — On-demand synthesis from a question; results stored with lower default trust.
Response trace — Record of a composed answer (/chat, /reflect), used for tier-2 reuse when still valid.
Retrieval trace — Record of a /query (or related read): candidates, signals, tier, and results.
S
Scope — Tags on records (org=acme, user=alice) that partition data within a Context. Subset matching controls what a query can see. Distinct from permissions.
Session — A conversation container: ordered turns, scope, and metadata.
Source.kind — Whether a fact came from a document, turn, reflect, elaboration, consolidation, and so on.
Source.span — Character positions in the originating message or passage for quotable citations.
Source.trust — Default weight reflecting how authoritative the source stream is (document versus casual turn, and so on).
Supersession — Replacing a prior assertion by setting valid_until on the old record while keeping history.
System time — Database MVCC history: what was stored at an instant. See Tri-temporal model.
T
Trace layer — Memory about how memory was used: retrieval, decision, and response traces.
Trust — See source.trust and calibration; central to why curated and conversational facts combine safely.
Turn — One message in a session (user, assistant, system, tool).
Tri-temporal — System, known, and valid time kept distinct. See Tri-temporal model.
U
Uncertainty (category) — Explicit “we do not know” or conflict records instead of guessed fill-ins.
Unified graph — One SurrealDB store for documents, turns, entities, relations, and traces. See Unified substrate and authority.
V
Valid time — When a fact held in the real world (valid_from / valid_until), independent of when Spectron learnt it.