The words we use across the product and this site, in plain language. If something here is doing work you did not expect it to do, that is our fault rather than yours.
- Board
- A live view of an architecture, drawn from your sources rather than drawn by hand. It is the central object in ProvenMap: everything else here either describes part of a board or something that happens to one.
- Layer
- A board has real depth. Open any node and you drop into its child layer — the same view, one level further in. A service on the top layer becomes its own map of modules underneath.
- Source
- Whatever a board is derived from. Usually a code repository. A board has one governing source — the thing it is primarily a map of — and may have reference sources it also reads to understand the wider estate.
- Intent
- A change you want made, authored against the board and anchored to the nodes it touches. Developers pull intents into their coding session, implement them, and sync the result back. An intent is the unit that travels from decision to code.
- Insight
- Something the analysis noticed about your system that you did not ask about — an unexpected dependency, a boundary that has eroded, a component nothing calls any more.
- Spec
- The written description attached to a node: what this part of the system is for, what it owns, and the constraints it is meant to hold to.
- Drift
- The gap between the architecture you intended and the one you actually have. Drift is normal and accumulates quietly; the point of a map derived from code is that it shows you the gap instead of hiding it.
- Verified
- Checked against the code, not asserted. When an intent comes back verified, it means the change was found in the source — not that someone ticked a box.
- Contributor
- A billed seat. Anyone who is a member of your organisation counts as one, whatever their role.
- Provenance
- Where a fact came from and how it was established. It is the root of the name: a ProvenMap is one whose claims can be traced back to the code they came from, rather than taken on trust.