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 architecture model of a system, landscape, decision, or planned change. 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 grounds a board: a repository, document, work item, decision record, or architect-authored model. A board can have a governing source and reference sources it reads to understand the wider estate.
- Intent
- A living spec: what you want changed and why, authored against the board and anchored to the nodes it touches. Unlike a written spec it does not freeze at hand-off — developers pull intents into their coding session, implement them, and sync the result back, and the intent carries the evidence of whether the code actually matches. An intent is the unit that travels from decision to code, and the record of that decision afterwards.
- Insight
- Something the analysis noticed across your systems that you did not ask about — an unexpected dependency, a boundary that has eroded, a component nothing calls any more.
- Drift
- The gap between the architecture you intended and the one you actually have. Drift is normal and accumulates quietly; ProvenMap shows the gap between model, source, and shipped reality instead of hiding it.
- Verified
- Checked against the relevant source, not asserted. When an intent comes back verified, it means the change was found where the board says reality lives — 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 source, model, or decision they came from, rather than taken on trust.