Glossary
Definitions for the terms used throughout this documentation.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Access policy | Organization-level controls over sign-in and sessions — multi-factor authentication, idle and session timeouts, credential lifetime caps — plus an Enterprise IP allowlist. |
| Access review | A point-in-time report of every member’s access to every environment in the organization, including access granted implicitly through organization-admin status. |
| Action | A step that runs when a rule's condition matches — for example calling an API, transforming data, writing to context, logging, or running an AI prompt. |
| Action set | A named, reusable list of actions that a rule can reference instead of defining actions inline. |
| Activation | A single rule firing during a forward-chaining run. The Max activations setting caps how many may occur before the run halts. |
| Active date window | The optional effective/expiration dates on a rule. Outside the window the rule is skipped exactly like a disabled rule — its condition is never evaluated and its actions never run. |
| Audit log | The append-only, newest-first record of every change to rules, releases, access, and credentials in an organization, filterable and (on Enterprise) exportable or streamed to a SIEM. |
| Authoring | Designing your logic — organizations, projects, rule sets, conditions, and actions — as opposed to running it. |
| Clause | The smallest part of a condition: a context value, an operator, and a value to compare against. |
| Clause group | A set of clauses (and nested groups) combined with All, Any, or None logic. |
| Compliance archive | An Enterprise add-on that writes a daily, write-once copy of the audit log and release evidence to immutable storage you own, kept for seven years. |
| Condition | The test that decides whether a rule matches. Built from clauses and groups; can be saved and reused or defined inline. |
| Context | The working data of a single run: the input you provide plus anything actions add as they execute. |
| Context key | The address used to read or write a value in the context, such as ticket.subject. |
| Correlation ID | An identifier assigned to each run that ties together its input, files, and log entries. |
| Coverage gap | A combination of input values that no rule in a rule set matches, reported by verification and shown in the decision table as a “Not covered” row. |
| Credit | Prepaid balance used for metered usage such as runs beyond your plan's allowance and AI generation. |
| Custom role | An organization-defined, additive role — up to 25 per organization on Enterprise — that grants extra permissions on top of the built-in Read, Write, Run, Debug, and Admin roles. |
| Data type / Data value | A value's type (String, Number, Boolean, DateTime, Blob, or Url) and the typed value itself. |
| Dedicated hosting | A hosting option where an environment runs in your own cloud subscription. |
| Deployment pipeline | An org-scoped, ordered list of stages, each bound to one environment with its own approval mode, that a project release is promoted through. |
| Derived fact | A context value computed on demand from other values the first time a rule reads it, rather than supplied as run input. |
| Disaster recovery | An Enterprise feature that backs up an entire organization — projects, conditions, action sets, rule sets, and tests — nightly to storage you own, with on-demand backup, download, and restore. |
| Effective date | The inclusive start of a rule's active date window, in UTC. Before it, the rule is not evaluated. Blank means the rule has no start bound. |
| Environment | An isolated place where rule sets run, owned by an organization, with its own settings, variables, schedules, storage, and logs. |
| Executing | Running a rule set inside an environment, as opposed to authoring it. |
| Expression | A small formula that computes a value from other values, such as ctx.price * ctx.qty. Usable wherever a value is read, and as the left side of a clause. |
| Expiration date | The exclusive end of a rule's active date window, in UTC. At and after it, the rule is not evaluated. Blank means the rule never expires. |
| Extension | A reusable, versioned unit of functionality that a rule can invoke through the Extension action. |
| Finding | One issue reported by verification, carrying a severity of Error, Warning, or Info and naming the rule, context key, or input region it concerns. |
| Backward chaining | The goal-driven inference strategy: the engine starts from the keys you want established and fires only the rules needed to produce them. Also called goal-driven evaluation. |
| Forward chaining | The inference strategy where rules re-fire as other rules change the context they read, until the run reaches a stable state. |
| Goal | A context key a goal-driven run works backwards from. Declared on the rule set, or overridden for one run. |
| Free tier | A no-cost hosting option on shared infrastructure with reduced limits. |
| Governance policy | Organization-wide release controls (Team plan and above) that set a floor every project and pipeline must meet or exceed — requiring approval, requiring tests to pass, requiring an approval stage, and enforcing four-eyes on promotions. |
| Hosting option | Where an environment runs: Dedicated, Shared, or Free tier. |
| Human intervention | A pause in a run while a person reviews and approves before it continues. |
| Inference | The opt-in execution mode that turns on forward chaining for a rule set, firing rules one at a time by salience and re-evaluating as the context changes. |
| MCP | Model Context Protocol — lets an AI assistant connect to your account so it can run your rule sets and read files and logs. |
| Machine API key | An organization-admin-issued credential with granular permissions, environment scoping, and an optional lifetime cap — distinct from the project/rule-set-scoped keys on the API Access screen. |
| OAuth & app authorizations | How you authorize third-party apps to act on your behalf, and review or revoke that access. |
| Organization | The ownership and billing boundary that holds members, plan, credits, projects, and environments. |
| Plan / Tier | The subscription level (Free, Pro, Team, or Enterprise) that sets an organization's limits and price. |
| Project | A container for related rule sets, conditions, and action sets within an organization. |
| Project release | An immutable, sequentially numbered snapshot naming the exact versions of every ruleset, condition, and action set in a project at one moment, promoted through a deployment pipeline. |
| Rule | A single unit of logic: one condition plus one or more actions that run when the condition matches. |
| Rule set | An ordered collection of rules plus a context definition; the unit you run. |
| Salience | A per-rule priority used only in inference: the highest-salience eligible rule fires first, with ties falling back to rule order. In goal-driven runs it decides which rule is preferred to establish a key. |
| Shared hosting | A hosting option where environments run on shared infrastructure managed for you. |
| Template | A prebuilt project or rule set you can import as a starting point. |
| Trace (inference) | A firing-by-firing record of an inference run — every firing, why each condition passed or failed, and each context change — viewable in run history and explainable with AI. |
| Variable | A named value stored in an environment that rules and actions can read while running. |
| Verification | A static check of a rule set that reads it instead of running it, reporting rules that can never fire, duplicates, conflicting writes, broken references, and coverage gaps. |
| What-if comparison | A sandboxed re-run that changes selected inputs and shows which outcomes flip versus a baseline, with a provenance chain back to the inputs. |