Glossary / Terms of the port
Eight records Eight components One vocabulary
The architecture depends on a small number of terms used exactly. These are the definitions this website follows.
The eight records
- Principal
- An organization or person that carries economic responsibility for a mission: the party on whose behalf an agent acts, or the party that supplies the work. Principals remain independent of each other and of the port.
- AgentIdentity
- A record that identifies a software participant. It tells a relying party which agent is involved. It does not establish who stands behind the agent or what the agent may do.
- Mandate
- A principal’s delegation for one specific mission: the permitted actions, scope, limits, expiry and revocation conditions, and any decision reserved for a human. A mandate is never inherited from another buyer or another mission.
- ServiceProfile
- A supplier’s versioned description of a service it offers. Profiles are designed to be portable between buyers. A profile describes; it does not authorize.
- MissionRecord
- The shared, versioned account of one mission: the agreed task, the principals, the authorized participants, the deadline, the acceptance criteria and each change of state.
- AcceptanceRule
- The criteria a buyer will use to evaluate the work, agreed with the supplier before execution. A rule can include machine checks and decisions reserved for a person.
- EvidenceEvent
- A single item of permitted evidence about a mission, recorded with its origin and an integrity check. Evidence supports verification; it does not guarantee that every external assertion is true.
- DisputeRecord
- A buyer’s or supplier’s recorded objection to a result, tied to the acceptance rule and the evidence in question. The procedure for resolving disputes has not yet been written.
The eight components
- Port Registry
- The proposed register of principals, agent identities and versioned service profiles. A listing is not an endorsement or a permission.
- Mandate Engine
- The proposed component that records scoped delegation, expiry, revocation and limits for each mission.
- Mission Record
- The proposed component that keeps the shared account of agreed tasks, participants, status and deadlines.
- Service Acceptance Network
- The first commercial hypothesis: buyers and suppliers agree criteria, suppliers submit permitted evidence, and buyers accept or dispute. Also called the first service terminal.
- Agent Resource Exchange
- Future research: a proposed means to discover and exchange services, compute and capabilities across independent providers.
- Mission Continuity
- Future research: a proposed mechanism for a mission to be resumed or handed to another authorized participant under a new, valid mandate.
- Evidence Ledger
- A supporting layer for integrity, provenance and audit events.
- Settlement Adapters
- A supporting layer that would connect to existing payment rails. No custody of client funds is proposed initially.
Working concepts
- Bounded mission
- A unit of delegated work with a defined deliverable, scope, deadline and acceptance criteria. The mission, not the agent, is the unit of delegation.
- Buyer A and Buyer B
- The two independent buyers in the validation experiment. Buyer A establishes a relationship with a supplier. Buyer B tests how much of it can be reused.
- Compatible execution controls
- Controls in an agent’s own runtime or platform that can read and honor a mandate. Without them, or a binding integration, a mandate is a record and not an enforcement mechanism.
- Federated ports
- A long-term scenario in which more than one port follows compatible operating rules. It depends on those rules being proven in one port first.
- Permitted evidence
- Evidence that every affected party has agreed may be recorded and, where stated, shared. Reuse is limited to what is permitted.
- Second-buyer reuse
- The measured reduction in active onboarding effort when an independent second buyer reuses a supplier’s profile, integration and permitted evidence. The decisive test of network value; not yet demonstrated.
- Service class
- A category of bounded digital service with comparable deliverables and acceptance criteria. The first validation needs exactly one; it has not been selected.
- Validation gate
- One of five targets in the proposed 90-day validation sequence. A gate counts as demonstrated only when a documented outcome supports it.