Glossary

Canonical terms used throughout CubeDynamics and the documentation.

Core objects

• Cube: An xarray DataArray with dimensions (time, y, x [, band]) carrying spatial metadata.
• VirtualCube: A lazy, streaming-aware cube that defers materialization until needed.
• Pipe: The cubedynamics.pipe helper that wraps a cube and enables | operator chaining.
• Verb: A callable from cubedynamics.verbs designed to compose inside a pipe chain.
• Vase: A 3-D hull defined by lofting time-stamped polygons through (time, y, x).
• Event hull: The time-aware outline generated from wildfire events or other geospatial drivers.
• Synchrony: Correlated behavior between locations or variables across time.
• Variance: Dispersion of a cube along a dimension; typically computed with v.variance.
• Anomaly: Departure from a baseline; often computed with v.anomaly or v.zscore.
• Climatology: A long-term baseline (e.g., multi-year mean) used for anomaly detection.

Old term → new term

Old term	New term / canonical vocabulary
cubelet	cube
flow / pipeline	pipe
function	verb
hull volume	vase
fire hull	event hull
co-occurrence	synchrony
deviation	anomaly

Use the new terms in code, docs, and examples to keep the vocabulary consistent.