Glossary

Accepted delivery: A run whose configured validation and quality gates permit use or publication.

Adapter: A component that connects a logical product to an external source, target, transform, or metadata system through DataRaft protocols.

Backend: The physical engine or service used for reading, executing, storing, or registering data.

Business date: The date a delivery is intended to represent for an SLA or publication process, distinct from the wall-clock execution time.

Candidate: Data being prepared and checked before it becomes an accepted result or release.

Contract: A versioned specification of columns, keys, rules, and composed metadata/policy that describes a product interface.

Data product: A named reusable definition combining inputs, preparation, expectations, metadata, and optional publication.

Definition version: Version of the product or contract definition. It is distinct from a physical release identifier.

Evidence: Metadata about execution, checks, inputs, outputs, timestamps, decisions, and warnings used to explain what happened.

Grain: What one row represents in a table product.

Input port: A declared consumer-facing input interface attached to a product.

Integrity verification: A check that retained bytes or release evidence still match what was recorded. Its strength depends on the backend and threat model.

Lineage: Evidence about dependencies between products, releases, or columns. Lineage can be complete, partial, or unknown depending on what the system can observe.

Logical layer: Product identity, meaning, expectations, and interfaces independent of a specific storage implementation.

Output port: A declared publication interface. Multiple outputs are sequential in current core and are not one distributed transaction.

Physical layer: Files, databases, query engines, registries, object stores, and services used to realize a logical product.

Policy: A governance rule evaluated at a supported lifecycle event such as validate or publish.

Product dependency: A relationship in which one product is used as an input or transformation dependency of another.

Quarantine: A quality action that removes failing rows before writing for supported native row predicates while retaining the rejected rows locally on the result.

Recipe: Ordered deferred data preparation steps attached to a product. It is not a fitted preprocessing model.

Release: A durable accepted publication. A release is not the same as a product definition or one execution attempt.

Run result: The outcome and evidence from one execution attempt, including status and quality information.

SLA: A declared delivery timing or freshness expectation evaluated against actual publication timing.

Source: A component or value that can supply input data at execution time.

Target: A component implementing publication behavior for accepted data.

Threshold: Permitted fraction of failed quality test units for a rule.

Volatile rule: A time-dependent or random check explicitly marked as volatile. Such checks limit reproducibility and cache guarantees.