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yinlianghui merged 1 commit into from
Aug 26, 2026
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docs(glossary): name the typed metadata artifact in the category's vocabulary #12385

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27 changes: 27 additions & 0 deletions content/docs/getting-started/glossary.mdx
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Expand Up@@ -80,6 +80,33 @@ Reusable error maps, suggestions, and metadata normalization utilities.

## Architecture Concepts

### Business Ontology
The enterprise-AI category's name for the thing these docs otherwise call **typed
metadata**, the **single source of truth**, or the **app contract**: one machine-readable
definition of a business domain — its objects and fields, the relations between them, the
permissions that govern them, and the flows and actions that operate on them. If you
arrived from that vocabulary, this is the term's referent here: the **Source** you author
(`objectstack.config.ts`) and the **Artifact** it compiles to (`objectstack.json`), from
which the runtime derives the database schema, REST API, UI, and MCP server. See
[Metadata-Driven Development](/docs/concepts/metadata-driven).

The word is worth stating explicitly because ObjectStack's differs from the hosted
ontologies the category otherwise means by it, on two points:

* **You own the definition.** It lives in your repository as ordinary TypeScript,
versioned in your VCS and reviewable as a diff, in a format specified and licensed
Apache-2.0 — not as a graph held inside a vendor's system and reachable only through
that vendor's console.
* **It is executed, not merely described.** The same definition is enforced at authoring
time by Zod schemas and the validation gate, and at runtime on every call — RBAC, FLS,
and audit included (see **Agent-Ready Boundaries** below). It is not a descriptive map
of behaviour implemented somewhere else, so it cannot drift from the system it
describes.

Distinct from **semantic layer**, which in these docs means the narrower analytics
`dataset` layer (ADR-0021) that reports and dashboards bind to — see
[Analytics & Datasets](/docs/data-modeling/analytics).

### Protocol-Driven
A development paradigm where logic is defined in static, declarative data formats (JSON/YAML) with Zod schemas rather than imperative code. The goal is to separate the **Intent** (Business Logic) from the **Implementation** (Tech Stack).

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