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# A shared vocabulary for the AEON ecosystem.

AEON uses familiar-looking syntax, but many of its important terms are about processing boundaries rather than ordinary data storage. This glossary explains both technical terms such as AES and everyday site terms such as author, consumer, claim, and authority.

Use it as a quick reference while reading the walkthroughs, philosophy page, language guide, schemas, and implementation material.

[Open terms](#terms)  
[Language philosophy](/philosophy.php)  
[AEON language](/aeon-language.php)

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## AEON terms are mostly about what is preserved, validated, or trusted.

### AEON
- **Definition:** a deterministic language and processing model for preserving structured semantic claims without granting the source executable authority.

### AEON Core
- **Definition:** the core language and parser layer responsible for recognizing AEON syntax and preserving structure as assignment events, without deciding domain meaning.

### AEOS
- **Definition:** the AEON schema layer. AEOS validates shape, required fields, declared types, and structural constraints; it does not prove business truth or domain meaning by itself.

### AES
- **Definition:** Assignment Event Stream. The ordered preservation artifact produced from AEON source, used by later validation, canonicalization, auditing, and materialization steps.

### Attribute
- **Definition:** structured local metadata attached to a binding, anonymous value, or node. Attributes carry side information without changing the value itself.

### Author
- **Definition:** the person, tool, system, or AI agent producing AEON source. The author can make claims, but does not automatically grant those claims authority.

### Authority
- **Definition:** the right to decide trust or materialization. In AEON, authority belongs to the receiving context, not to the source document by itself.

### Binding
- **Definition:** an assignment from an identity to a value, with optional attributes and type labels. At the surface it can look like key plus value; semantically it carries identity plus claims.

### Canonical form
- **Definition:** a stable representation of accepted AEON used for comparison, signing, hashing, review, caching, and reproducible processing without preserving irrelevant formatting differences.

### Claim
- **Definition:** something the document says about structure, type, intent, relationship, or meaning. Claims are preserved by AEON and accepted, rejected, or interpreted by consumers.

### Consumer
- **Definition:** the system receiving AEON. The consumer chooses which schemas, profiles, policies, conventions, and Tonics it trusts for the current context.

### Contract
- **Definition:** an explicit agreement a consumer can verify against, usually combining expectations about schemas, profiles, accepted claims, and materialization rules.

### Convention
- **Definition:** a documented meaning pattern layered on top of AEON Core. Conventions let communities share intent without making that intent an implicit parser rule.

### CTS
- **Definition:** Conformance Test Suite. A shared test corpus used to check that AEON implementations agree on syntax, parsing behavior, canonical expectations, and edge cases.

### Deterministic
- **Definition:** producing the same accepted result for the same input and rules. Determinism lets AEON support reproducible validation, canonicalization, signing, and audit trails.

### Materialization
- **Definition:** the explicit step where accepted AEON meaning becomes a runtime object, rendered document, generated code, API payload, or other concrete output.

### Negative space semantics
- **Definition:** meaning created by what AEON refuses to infer: references are not automatically values, schemas are not truth, comments are not execution, and type labels are not runtime classes.

### Node
- **Definition:** a tagged tree value for ordered, nested, document-like structure. Nodes are semantic structures that may later materialize as HTML, Markdown, PDFs, UI trees, or other projections.

### Non-executable
- **Definition:** AEON source describes and preserves claims; it does not run as code. Any action happens in trusted consumer tools outside the source document's own authority.

### Profile
- **Definition:** a named processing or interpretation context that narrows which features, schemas, conventions, or materialization behavior a consumer accepts.

### Reference
- **Definition:** a symbolic relationship to another address in the document. AEON preserves the relationship graph before any trusted consumer resolves it.

### Schema
- **Definition:** a validation document or rule set that checks form: existence, required fields, declared types, shape, and structural constraints.

### Semantic comment
- **Definition:** a preserved comment channel for notes, annotations, review context, or AI instructions. Semantic comments can be interpreted by consumers, but they do not execute by themselves.

### Semantic preservation
- **Definition:** the design principle of preserving distinctions such as type labels, references, comments, identity, order, and structure until a trusted consumer explicitly collapses them.

### Tonic
- **Definition:** a trusted materializer or consumer-side adapter that turns accepted AEON meaning into a runtime object, rendered document, API payload, or other projection.

### Type label
- **Definition:** an explicit claim about the intended value family or domain type. A type label is preserved by the parser; it is not automatically a runtime class.

### Value
- **Definition:** the assigned content of a binding or anonymous item: a scalar, object, list, tuple, node, reference, prose block, encoded value, or special literal.