Reference
Glossary.
Every term this site uses, defined once and used consistently everywhere else. Where a word has a loose industry meaning and a precise one here, both are given, because the gap between them is usually where a misunderstanding starts.
The protocol
Assistants and tools.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| MCP | The Model Context Protocol: an open standard that lets an AI assistant call tools you run. It standardises how a tool is described and invoked, and deliberately says nothing about who may call it. See what is MCP. |
| Host | The assistant application the person is actually using. It decides which servers to connect to. |
| Server | The service that advertises tools and answers calls to them. In this platform, one hosted service serves every client, and isolation is by grant rather than by deployment. |
| Tool | One named operation with typed arguments – "describe the model", "read a slice", "search documents". The unit that a grant permits or withholds. |
| Connector | The adapter for one category of system: CRM, documents, tasks, planning model. Tools are named per category rather than per product, so a second adapter for the same category answers the same tool names. |
Permission
Who may reach what.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Organization | A client, treated as an isolation class rather than as a label. A customer organization may only ever reach its own projects, enforced both where grants are created and where they are used. |
| Project | Exactly one database or environment, with its own connection secret. Development, test and production are separate projects, which is why every answer can name where it came from. |
| Person | One row per human, keyed by verified email. Belonging to several projects is normal and governed rather than an error. |
| Grant | Person x project x skills. The only path to any system. Revoking one takes effect on the next call, with no cache to wait for. |
| Skill | A named capability that a grant may include. An empty skill list grants nothing, which is the deliberate default. |
| Narrowing gate | One of four checks applied to what a grant offers. Each can only remove a tool, never add one, so their order changes the reason given but not the outcome. See permission gates. |
| Deny by default | Every unknown is a refusal: no grant, no email, ambiguous project, unreachable control plane. The safe assumption is the restrictive one. |
Identity
How a person is established.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Delegated access | Calling a third-party system as the person asking, using their own sign-in, so that system applies its own permissions. The opposite of an application credential, where every request looks identical regardless of who asked. |
| Application credential | A single credential the service holds for a whole system. Convenient, and it means the system on the other end cannot tell your people apart – so any per-person narrowing has to be done by us. See whose permissions apply. |
| Identity provider | Your own directory, which answers who somebody is. It stays the only such list; we hold no directory, no passwords and no group memberships. |
The record
What happened, afterwards.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Audit trail | The record of every call, allowed or refused, with who, when, which environment, which tool and why. It never contains the figures or document contents that came back. See the audit trail. |
| Reason code | A stable name for why a call was refused, rather than a sentence somebody rephrased. Seventeen exist and a test freezes them, because this is data somebody reads years later. |
| Knowledge | Your written rules, vocabulary and guidance, approved by a named person before anything uses them. It arrives after every access decision and after the read, is carried as untrusted data, and cannot widen anything. |
The distinction
Two words that get used interchangeably and should not be.
Reading
- The query runs against your system at the moment somebody asks.
- Your permissions are whatever they are right now.
- Nothing exists to fall out of step, because nothing was stored.
Indexing
- Your content is copied into another store, once.
- That store re-applies a model of your permissions.
- When the model drifts from reality, the failure is silent and looks like a confident answer.