Glossary — Decision Integrity terminology.
SnapOS uses several everyday-sounding words more narrowly than casual usage — on purpose. A familiar term left undefined tends to get silently promoted to a bigger claim than intended. This page exists to close that gap, one term at a time.
Decision Integrity
Whether an AI-supported decision is still authorized by its evidence, assumptions, mandate, scope and time — not whether the system runs or the rules were documented.
Mandate
The documented condition under which a decision was originally approved to act. Not a legal or regulatory order — often an internal approval.
Mandate Drift
Execution continues after the authority or mandate that originally justified it has changed or expired, without anyone deciding that it should continue.
Authority
The documented reference for who was entitled to approve, continue, override or decide one specific decision, at one specific time, within one specific scope. Not organizational rank, legal power, or system-admin rights.
Evidence
The documented support cited for a claim. Evidence can itself be insufficient — that is a possible finding, not a contradiction in terms.
Scope
The specific boundary — population, use case, time window — within which a claim or a piece of evidence actually applies.
Witness
A structural reference point in a review record — not a person who testifies. A witness is usually a documented field: source, object, evidence, authority, time or reviewer.
Decision Identity
Whether today's decision is still recognizably the one that was authorized — not who is making it.
Continuous Legitimacy
The idea that a decision must remain legitimate not only when it is issued, but for as long as it continues to be relied on.
Semantic Stability
Whether the meaning a system assigns to its own state has drifted over time — independent of whether its output performance looks unchanged.
Reliance Boundary
The point at which a finding or review result stops being usable to support a decision.
Reopen Trigger
A documented condition under which a finding or decision record must be reviewed again. Not necessarily automated.
Conformance (SnapOS-inspired / -compatible / -conformant)
A three-tier distinction between using SnapOS vocabulary loosely, meeting the minimal output schema, and satisfying the full conformance gates.
Audit (in the SnapOS sense)
A bounded review product with a defined object, scope, evidence and reliance statement — not an automatic certification.
Unsupported Transfer
A claim, finding or output moves across workflow, regime or decision context without a record of how or why it moved.
Evidence Boundary Failure
A claim is supported by evidence within one context but reused beyond the boundary that evidence actually covers.
Green-Light Failure
Local controls and checks all report as passing while the overall decision trajectory has drifted from its original basis.
Semantic Surface Replication
SnapOS-like vocabulary or narrative is reproduced without the underlying audit-output contract that gives those terms meaning.
This glossary defines terms; it does not describe the private methodology behind them. For the public output contract, see the Conformance Suite. For the named research concepts, see the public reference model. For the underlying research papers, see Publications.