Glossary
Terms for the semantic model. They describe software interpretation, not independent verification of scientific meaning.
| Term | Meaning and boundary |
|---|---|
| Environmental product | Provider-published observations/estimates with a procedure, coverage, support, units and revision history |
| Observation | A product value, including measured, interpolated, remotely retrieved, modeled or derived values |
| Noun | Readable environmental input name; provider/product source qualifier retains observational identity |
| Verb | Named operation; a configured factory stage accepts the current value. Some public helpers are direct calls rather than factories |
| Parameter | Explicit setting such as dimension, threshold, comparator, quantile or connectivity |
| Cube | Labeled multidimensional scientific object; common rasters have time, y, x and optional band, but the grammar also accepts static, vector, station and summary shapes |
| Pipe | Wrapper passing the value through callables in authored order and recording local inspection state; not a scheduler |
| Analysis/workflow | The analysis is the sequence interpreted scientifically; the workflow also includes preparation, environment, storage and later work |
| Condition | Dataset with Boolean state, optionally defined magnitude/threshold; not a general unknown/invalid-value model |
| Reduction/summary | Removal of named variation; a condition mean is an indexed occurrence proportion rather than a Boolean condition |
| Branch | Separately composed pipe; unwrapping before combination does not merge complete upstream histories |
| Semantic state | Declared or metadata-inferred current role and context; not a new container hierarchy or scientific certification |
| Trace | Completed stages, parameters, messages and transitions within one pipe; work before pipe() and after unwrap() is outside it |
| Provenance | Source, request, processing and derivation records; broader than the local trace |
| Observation support | Area/time interval represented by a value; coordinate equality alone does not establish matching support |
| Alignment | Explicit computational relationship of operands; not evidence of product interchangeability |
| Anomaly | Departure from a declared baseline; subtracting a selected-month mean is not necessarily a climatological anomaly |
| Climatology | Explicitly defined longer-term reference, with period and method; not a synonym for every selected-period mean |
| Co-occurrence | Conditions satisfied together under declared alignment; does not by itself establish synchrony, causality or impact |
| Synchrony | Project methods measuring temporal/spatial association under specific definitions; not interchangeable with every overlap statistic |
| Fixture/QA | Fixed reviewed bytes and bounded checks with source, query, hashes and scope; not universal scientific truth |
| Vignette | Executable scientific question, data, code, figures, interpretation and reproduction record |
| Guardrail | Rule that rejects or reports a cataloged mismatch; successful execution still needs scientific review |
| VirtualCube | Deferred representation whose specific operations/materialization contract determines laziness |
| Fire VASE/hull | Project vocabulary for time-indexed fire geometry; not a competing definition of the minimal grammar |
The nine runtime roles are observation, continuous_field,
categorical_field, condition, event, feature, relationship, summary,
and network. Detailed data,
condition, and
branch contracts own their boundaries.
Everyday words such as function, workflow, overlap, event and anomaly should
not be mechanically replaced by verb, pipe, synchrony, regional episode or
climatology: each has its own scope.