Normative terminology

This page is the complete normative vocabulary for MissionWeaveProtocol 0.1. It renders the pinned local

CONTEXT.md artifact

inside the website; implementations do not need a repository README or docs checkout to resolve these terms.

The specification’s terms and roles refine this glossary where a protocol rule needs additional precision.

This context defines the language for organization-internal Missions completed by coordinator-led groups of autonomous Agents.

Protocol identity

MissionWeaveProtocol

The canonical organization-internal cooperation protocol for autonomous Agents working in Mission Groups.

Avoid: Abbreviated, spaced, or alternate product names

Organization and identity

Organization

The trusted governance root that registers Agents, defines policy, and authenticates humans.

Avoid: Network, federation

Agent

A single independently scheduled runtime with one stable identity and at most one active session.

Avoid: Service, replica, process pool

Agent Card

An organization-signed description of an Agent's stable identity and verified capabilities.

Avoid: Profile, presence

Agent Registry

The Organization-controlled source of current Agent Cards, immutable signing-key bindings, their validity history, and capability evidence for registered Principals.

Avoid: Presence service, peer discovery

Signed Document

A durable protocol object whose required top-level signature authenticates its canonical content under one Signed Document Verification Profile.

Avoid: Session authentication, transport frame

Signed Document Verification Profile

The normative mapping from one durable signed-document schema to its protected signed time and expected signer for signature and key-validity verification.

Avoid: Session authentication, algorithm negotiation

First-Admission Record

An Organization-controlled acceptance record that binds a Signed Document's signing hash, signing key ID, signer Principal, and trusted acceptance time. It is external to the Signed Document and its Verification Profile.

Avoid: Local first-seen time, signer-supplied timestamp, self-authenticating Event

Principal

An authenticated Agent, human, or Organization service that can be named as the actor or owner of a protocol object.

Avoid: Display name, unauthenticated user

Presence Record

Ephemeral information about an Agent's availability, capacity, and recent heartbeat.

Avoid: Agent Card

Capability

A versioned, organization-governed kind of work an Agent is verified to perform.

Avoid: Permission, free-form skill

Group Authority

Organization infrastructure that authenticates actors, validates policy and Membership, serializes Group transitions, and appends Events without acting as the Mission's semantic manager.

Avoid: Coordinator, consensus protocol

Authorization Service

The Organization service that evaluates execution policy and issues short-lived scoped capability tokens after assignment, lease, budget, and approval checks succeed.

Avoid: Agent Registry, Scheduler

Capability Token

A short-lived execution grant bound to one Worker session, WorkItem, Ownership Epoch, Execution Lease, allowed operations and resources, and bounded budgets.

Avoid: Capability, reusable credential

Membership Token

A short-lived authorization bound to one Principal, Group, Membership Epoch, Session Epoch, and least-privilege role set.

Avoid: Capability Token, subscription

Mission collaboration

Mission

A bounded objective with a definition of done, budget, deadline, and approval lifecycle.

Avoid: Project, task

Child Mission

A Mission created to complete one complex WorkItem of a parent Mission.

Avoid: Subtask

Follow-up Mission

A new Mission linked to an immutable approved Mission when later correction or additional work is required.

Avoid: Editing an approved Mission

Group

The temporary collaboration space and shared history belonging to exactly one Mission.

Avoid: Channel, room, team

MissionOwner

A Mission's accountable principal. A root MissionOwner is human and holds final approval, cancellation, and Coordinator-replacement authority. A child MissionOwner is the parent Coordinator and approves the child result on behalf of its parent WorkItem; organization risk policy may additionally require direct human approval.

Avoid: User, administrator

Coordinator

The replaceable Agent responsible for planning, assignment, monitoring, integration, and submission.

Avoid: POC Agent, manager service, sequencer

Worker

An Agent that accepts and executes WorkItems using its own queues and Scheduler.

Avoid: Sub-agent, tool

Membership

The scoped authorization connecting an Agent or MissionOwner to one Group.

Avoid: Subscription, presence

Work Delegate

A Group member eligible to authorize narrowly scoped WorkItems through an explicit Delegation Grant; the role itself grants no work-authoring authority.

Avoid: Coordinator, unrestricted administrator

Delegation Grant

An authoritative, non-transferable authorization from the current Coordinator to one Work Delegate for one target WorkItem subtree, bounded by capability versions, cumulative Resource Budget, descendant depth, expiry, and Membership and Coordinator Epochs. It ends when its target becomes terminal.

Avoid: Role name alone, transferable credential

Conversation and work

Conversation

An auditable thread of Messages scoped to a Group or one WorkItem.

Avoid: Session, chat log

Message

Committed conversational context that never grants executable authority by itself.

Avoid: Command, instruction

WorkItem

An explicit unit of Mission work with an owner, lifecycle, dependencies, and Work Contract.

Avoid: Message, Mission, job

Work Proposal

A non-executable request by any Group member to create a WorkItem; only a Coordinator or scoped delegate can authorize it into an executable obligation.

Avoid: Assignment, Message-only authority

Work Offer

An expiring invitation for an eligible Worker to accept a WorkItem after local admission control.

Avoid: Assignment, ownership

Admission Control

The Worker's decision that an offered WorkItem fits its capability, authorization, queue capacity, deadline, dependency, and budget constraints before acceptance.

Avoid: Coordinator assignment, scheduling priority

Selection Basis

The auditable facts used to choose an offered Worker, including capability matches, authorization eligibility, availability, cost, reliability Evidence, and applied policy.

Avoid: Private reasoning, ranking prompt

Work Contract

The goal, deliverables, acceptance criteria, inputs, permissions, deadline, and retry budget of a WorkItem.

Avoid: Prompt, request

Artifact

An immutable content-addressed deliverable produced or referenced by Mission work.

Avoid: Attachment, message payload

Evidence

Recorded facts used to evaluate an Artifact or WorkItem against its acceptance criteria.

Avoid: Opinion, chain-of-thought

Checkpoint

A structured, durable, safe-to-resume execution state reference used for blocking, recovery, and cooperative preemption.

Avoid: Percentage progress, private memory dump

Context Package

A signed, versioned summary with provenance that gives an Agent scoped Mission context.

Avoid: Memory dump, transcript

Coordination and state

Command

A signed request by an authorized actor to make one structured state transition.

Avoid: Message, Event

Action ID

A stable identifier chosen by a Command actor so retries of identical signed content are idempotent and conflicting reuse is rejected.

Avoid: Event ID, attempt number

Correlation ID

An identifier linking related Commands, Events, and external work without imposing ordering.

Avoid: Group sequence, Action ID

Event

An immutable accepted fact. A Group Event belongs to one Group's monotonic history; the explicitly defined Agent Card registration and Session activation facts are Organization-scoped Events without a Group sequence.

Avoid: Command, notification

Cursor

The highest contiguous Group Event position durably processed by an Agent.

Avoid: Offset, timestamp

Attention Filter

A delivery preference that narrows live Group traffic while preserving the member's right to retrieve authorized history.

Avoid: Membership visibility, access control

Delivery

At-least-once transport of durable Events to an authorized Group member, with deduplication by Event ID and progress acknowledged by Cursor.

Avoid: Exactly-once side effect

Replay

Ordered redelivery of a Group's Events after a durable Cursor, subject to Membership visibility.

Avoid: Cross-Group ordering

Membership Epoch

A monotonic value fencing Commands, tokens, and Delegation Grants issued under an older version of one Group Membership.

Avoid: Session Epoch, Presence

Coordinator Epoch

A monotonic value fencing a replaced Coordinator, its prior role lease, and its Delegation Grants.

Avoid: Ownership Epoch, leader-election term

Ownership Lease

A bounded reservation that keeps one Worker assigned to an exclusive WorkItem before and between active execution periods.

Avoid: Execution Lease, permanent assignment

Execution Lease

A renewable, fenced grant allowing one Worker Session and Ownership Epoch to execute an exclusive WorkItem. Execution Commands reference its stable Lease ID; short-lived capability tokens bind to that Lease ID and may rotate without changing the lease.

Avoid: Lock, assignment

Session Epoch

A monotonic value fencing replaced runtimes that share one Agent identity over time.

Avoid: WorkItem lease

Ownership Epoch

A monotonic value fencing previous owners of an exclusive WorkItem.

Avoid: Session epoch

Scheduler

The Worker-owned policy that selects eligible WorkItems across its per-Group queues and capacity slots.

Avoid: Coordinator, queue

Capacity Slot

One isolated unit of Worker concurrency with its own Group context, credentials, checkpoint, and side-effect scope.

Avoid: Agent identity, thread

Resource Budget

Hard limits on financial cost, model tokens, tool calls, compute time, wall time, and external actions allocated to a Mission, WorkItem, or Delegation Grant.

Avoid: Estimate, priority

Budget Ledger

The authoritative hierarchical account of allocated limits, cumulative usage, and remaining capacity for Missions and WorkItems.

Avoid: Local token meter, cost estimate

Resource Usage Record

A signed nonzero resource delta bound to a WorkItem, Ownership Epoch, and Execution Lease and atomically rolled through its budget ancestry.

Avoid: Progress percentage, budget allocation

Approval

A durable signed decision accepting a specific Mission revision and exact Artifact set.

Avoid: Coordinator review, verification

Execution Approval

A time-bounded signed human decision permitting specified high-risk operations, resources, and budget for one WorkItem Ownership Epoch before a capability token is issued.

Avoid: Final Approval, Work Offer

Cooperation Override Grant

A durable, one-shot approval for one Principal to exceed one cooperation limit through one exact Command in one Mission Group before a stated expiry.

Avoid: Boolean override, reusable exemption

Group Snapshot

A signed archival projection through a specific Group sequence, linked to the retained Event and policy-log history from which it was produced.

Avoid: Mutable database backup

Policy Log

An append-only record of authorization, budget, risk, escalation, and redaction decisions needed to audit a Group's state transitions.

Avoid: Agent reasoning trace

Extension Profile

An organization-approved, versioned schema and semantics package that cannot override core invariants.

Avoid: Plugin, arbitrary event type

Localized terminology

Child Mission display name

Localized prose uses 子任务 in both Simplified and Traditional Chinese, サブタスク in Japanese, subtarea in Spanish, sous-tâche in French, and Unteraufgabe in German. Each display name denotes a complete Child Mission with its own Group, Coordinator, budget, and Approval lifecycle, never a WorkItem; Chinese prose uses 工作项 in Simplified Chinese or 工作項 in Traditional Chinese for a WorkItem.

Avoid: 子 Mission, 子使命, 子ミッション, Mission hija, Mission enfant, German forms of untergeordnete Mission, 子任務, using 子任务 for a WorkItem