2. Conventions and terminology

This section is normative.

The key words MUST, MUST NOT, REQUIRED, SHALL, SHALL NOT, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT, RECOMMENDED, NOT RECOMMENDED, MAY and OPTIONAL are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 (RFC 2119 and RFC 8174) when, and only when, they appear in all capitals.

JSON terms (object, array, string, number) follow RFC 8259. Timestamps are strings in RFC 3339 format with a time zone offset.

Term	Definition
Record	A JSON object of one of the six record types defined in section 4.
Intent	A versioned statement of what a change must achieve, with its acceptance criteria.
Criterion	One verifiable acceptance criterion inside an intent.
Artifact	Anything produced during delivery: code, a test, a contract, a dataset, a document. OIS references it, it does not store it.
Actor	A human, an AI agent or a tool that produces artifacts, records evidence or makes decisions.
Evidence	A record that a specific test run produced a specific result for a specific criterion.
Decision	A record of an approval, rejection or gate outcome, made by an actor.
Finding	A record of a defect or incident: behaviour that violates a criterion, or behaviour that nobody required.
Bundle	A JSON object that transports several records together.
Quality Passport	A signed attestation that collects the intents, evidence, decisions and open findings behind a release.
Producer	An implementation that creates OIS records.
Consumer	An implementation that reads OIS records.
Digest	A cryptographic hash of content, expressed as a map from algorithm name to hex value.