Canonical definitions
Use the same words.
Preserve the same boundaries.
A searchable definition set for operation design, evidence, attribution, oversight, roles, international fairness, publication, and active AI memory.
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What is the IARPG glossary?
It is the canonical plain-language definition layer for the current IARPG-OPS-2 publication. Each term has a stable fragment link, a machine-readable DefinedTerm entry, and a route to the first-party standard or tool that provides more detail.
- Definitions
- 142
- Groups
- 9
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142 definitions
Operations lifecycle
10 definitions- Authority
- The institution, client, community, coalition, or other body that can legitimately assign, constrain, review, or terminate a fictional operation.
- Customer
- The recipient that needs an intelligence product or operational outcome. A customer may differ from the authority that approved the work.
- Mandate
- The declared purpose and permitted scope of an operation, including the legal, institutional, ethical, and gameplay limits that apply.
- Intelligence requirement
- A specific question that collection and analysis must answer. It guides evidence gathering without predetermining the conclusion.
- Operational state
- A named stage in the deterministic operation lifecycle, such as Task, Plan, Access, Collect, Validate, Deliver, Extract, or Debrief.
- Abort condition
- A published threshold or event that requires the operation to stop, pause, or change course before additional harm or exposure occurs.
- Compromise indicator
- An observable sign that cover, access, evidence integrity, personnel safety, or operational secrecy may no longer be reliable.
- Extraction
- The planned recovery of personnel, sources, evidence, or access after collection or when a declared risk threshold is crossed.
- Debrief
- The closing record that separates observed facts, assessments, uncertainty, source effects, cover effects, unresolved questions, and follow-on work.
- Operation package
- The portable machine-readable record that connects mission design, evidence, simulation, review, handoffs, integrity, migration, and publication.
Evidence and analysis
24 definitions- Evidence packet
- A structured collection of evidence items and their relationships, including origin, time, reliability, confidence, provenance, jurisdiction, and review status.
- Archival supplied source
- A preserved original input whose file identity, byte count, checksum, and source-authored metadata are retained. Its presence does not establish factual correctness, current authority, independent review, local acceptance, or publication approval.
- Source
- A person, sensor, record, system, public document, synthetic character, or other origin from which a claim or observation is obtained.
- Source reliability
- An assessment of how consistently a source has provided accurate, well-grounded, or verifiable information. It is separate from the truth of a specific claim.
- Claim status
- The bounded disposition of one proposition, such as claimed, reported, corroborated, substantiated, proven, refuted, unresolved, or superseded. It is separate from analytic confidence and source reliability.
- Attribution rung
- One step in the evidence chain from observed content or event through content status, coordination, actor identity, sponsorship, intent, reach, and effect. Evidence for one rung does not automatically establish the next.
- Evidence origin chain
- The trace from a publication or artifact back to the earliest accessible source or record. Multiple derivatives of one origin are not independent corroboration.
- Actor-controlled source
- A statement, channel, dataset, or artifact published by the actor, subject, sponsor, or stakeholder whose conduct is under review. It can establish what that actor said or released, but not automatically whether the broader claim is true.
- Coordination
- Evidence that multiple assets or participants acted together through a shared plan, infrastructure, administration, timing, or tasking relationship. Similar content, shared symbols, or simultaneous interest alone do not prove coordination.
- Sponsor attribution
- A bounded conclusion that a principal funded, directed, controlled, or formally backed an actor or campaign, supported by evidence stronger than thematic alignment, geography, language, or a shared adversary.
- Reach
- Documented exposure or distribution, such as verified views, impressions, recipients, or pickup. Reach does not establish persuasion, agreement, behavioral change, or causal effect.
- Effect
- A demonstrated change in belief, behavior, policy, operational outcome, or other result attributable to the exposure or action under review. Visibility, virality, outage, or engagement alone do not establish effect.
- Leaderless network
- A network without a single formal command structure whose participants may still have temporary administrators, organizers, technical specialists, informal influence, splinters, imitators, and internal disagreement.
- Oversight capability
- A specific accountability power, such as authorization, records access, compulsion, inspection, complaint intake, adjudication, binding remedy, public reporting, appeal, or correction. Institutional titles are not substitutes for the capability itself.
- Binding remedy
- An enforceable outcome that can stop activity, quash authority, delete or correct data, compensate harm, require action, or otherwise change the affected person’s legal or practical position. Criticism and recommendation are not the same as binding remedy.
- Metadata inference
- A derived hypothesis about identity, behavior, location, relationship, or another attribute produced from metadata or joined records. It must remain separate from observed data and from any consequential decision that uses it.
- Confidence
- A bounded expression of how strongly the available evidence supports an assessment. Confidence must not be treated as proof.
- Corroboration
- Independent support for a claim from another evidence item, source, method, or discipline that does not merely repeat the same origin.
- Contradiction
- A documented conflict between claims, observations, or records that must remain visible until it is resolved or explicitly carried as uncertainty.
- Competing hypothesis
- A plausible alternative explanation tested against the same evidence to reduce confirmation bias and premature closure.
- Provenance
- The traceable history of where a record came from, how it was transformed, which tool or person handled it, and what evidence supports its current state.
- Chain of custody
- The ordered record of possession, transfer, verification, and alteration controls applied to evidence or a package.
- Truth boundary
- A statement describing what a document, test, or data source establishes and what it does not establish.
- Reason code
- A stable machine-readable label that explains why a state changed, a finding was raised, or a decision was made.
Roles, access, and security
11 definitions- Field Operative
- The role that performs approved in-world access, observation, collection, delivery, and extraction tasks within the mission contract.
- Case Officer
- The role that manages tasking, sources, cover, access, communication, and operational risk while preserving authority and evidence boundaries.
- Intelligence Analyst
- The role that evaluates evidence, tests hypotheses, expresses uncertainty, records dissent, and produces the intelligence product.
- Technical Officer
- The role that operates approved technical systems, sensors, communications, integrity checks, and data-handling workflows.
- Support or Liaison
- The role that coordinates logistics, jurisdiction, partner access, translation, local context, or communication between authorities and teams.
- Cut-out
- An intermediary that limits direct contact or knowledge between parties, creating deliberate separation inside the fictional operation.
- Cover
- The declared in-world identity, role, rationale, and behavior used to explain an operative’s presence and activity.
- Access
- The authorized ability to reach a location, person, system, record, or audience required by the fictional mission.
- Compartmentation
- The deliberate restriction of information so each role receives only the knowledge required for its responsibilities.
- Counterintelligence
- The defensive practice of identifying deception, compromise, manipulation, unauthorized access, or hostile collection inside the fictional game system.
- Role replay
- A review view that reconstructs what each role knew, received, acknowledged, changed, and handed off at each stage.
Alliances, factions, and network influence
36 definitions- Alliance lifecycle
- The changing institutional path from contact and confidence building through limited cooperation, formalization, integration, stress, adaptation, hedging, fracture, or exit.
- Campaign turn
- One deterministic fictional state transition that records the selected stress event, institutional response, evidence, consultation, relationship versions, consequences, correction path, and reversal rule.
- Campaign branch
- A campaign record replayed from a shared immutable baseline. A branch preserves its own ordered turns and current relationship versions without implying that it is morally better, more loyal, or more truthful than another branch.
- Campaign archive workspace
- A browser-local tool that validates, replays, compares, and exports campaign-branch differences while retaining source files unchanged and making no network or persistent-storage request.
- Branch divergence
- A deterministic difference between campaign branches at selected return points, expressed through relationship versions, domains, evidence, consultation, corrections, burdens, dependencies, or community consequences rather than a universal score.
- Replay return point
- A selected committed turn, including Turn 0, at which a campaign branch is reconstructed from the immutable baseline for comparison or review.
- Extension preservation
- The rule that unknown imported fields remain in the original campaign record even when the current validator evaluates only the published known contract fields.
- Relationship version
- A numbered, immutable snapshot of one domain-specific relationship state. A later turn creates a new version instead of silently replacing the prior record.
- Reversal condition
- The declared evidence, consultation, remedy, expiry, or review condition that permits a fictional relationship to return to its immediately prior version.
- Burden distribution
- A bounded description of how institutional costs, work, or responsibilities are shared. It is not a measure of virtue, loyalty, power, or human worth.
- Dependency level
- A low, medium, or high fictional description of reliance within a named domain, paired with alternatives or mitigation rather than treated as a moral weakness.
- Consultation decision
- A recorded institutional choice that names participants, the decision rule, the decision, dissent, and what must be preserved for later review.
- Affected-community consequence
- A campaign record describing who may experience the effects of an institutional decision, the likely effect, its severity, the safeguard, and the condition that requires review or remedy.
- Correction event
- A versioned record that identifies an unsupported or superseded claim, publishes the corrected statement, preserves the prior record, and explains what changed.
- Reversible transition
- A relationship change that preserves the prior state and names the evidence and consultation conditions required to restore it without deleting history.
- Alliance
- A recurring institutional relationship with a declared scope, decision process, obligations, costs, dependencies, tensions, and exit conditions. It is not a universal friendship score.
- Collective defense
- A formal commitment among members to consult and provide support under defined conditions. The exact response still depends on the governing instrument and political decision process.
- Strategic partnership
- Broad, recurring cooperation across selected domains without an automatic mutual-defense obligation.
- Intelligence liaison
- A bounded relationship for exchanging assessed information under handling, source-protection, oversight, and releasability rules.
- Multi-alignment
- The deliberate maintenance of meaningful relationships with actors that may compete with one another, often to preserve autonomy or options.
- Hedging
- Deliberate cooperation with competing partners to preserve autonomy, reduce dependency, and keep multiple options available.
- Nonalignment
- An active policy of avoiding permanent attachment to a major bloc while pursuing issue-specific cooperation according to the actor’s own interests.
- Deconfliction
- Communication between actors that may not be allies, intended to reduce accidental interference, misunderstanding, or escalation.
- Patron-client relationship
- An asymmetric exchange in which a stronger actor provides resources, protection, access, or political support while the weaker actor provides cooperation, access, or other value. Autonomy must be assessed rather than assumed absent.
- Proxy relationship
- A narrow relationship classification requiring evidence relevant to support, dependency, direction, or control. Shared goals, a common adversary, or post-event praise alone do not establish it.
- Sponsorship
- Sustained financial, political, organizational, or material backing that does not by itself establish command or proxy control.
- Sponsored but autonomous
- A relationship in which material or political support is established but operational control is not. The supported actor retains meaningful independent decision-making.
- Faction
- An organized actor with interests, constraints, internal blocs, decision rules, resources, dependencies, oversight, legitimacy questions, and possible future paths. A faction is not treated as a single mind.
- Internal bloc
- A constituency, professional group, regional wing, leadership coalition, or other organized tendency inside a faction that may disagree about priorities or methods.
- Relationship domain
- The field in which a relationship applies, such as security, intelligence, trade, technology, humanitarian access, diplomacy, infrastructure, or governance.
- Recruitment pathway
- A high-level organizational route into participation, such as open application, legal eligibility, institutional sponsorship, invitation, contract work, or supporter activity. It does not mean a persuasion script.
- Network adjacency
- Evidence that an actor is socially, informationally, materially, or organizationally near a network without necessarily being directed or controlled by it.
- Lone actor
- An actor for whom external command over a specific act has not been established. The term does not automatically imply social, ideological, or informational isolation.
- Post-event adoption
- Praise, affiliation, or a claim issued after an event, which does not by itself prove prior contact, sponsorship, direction, or control.
- Disavowal
- A public or private rejection of an act, actor, claim, or relationship. Disavowal is evidence of a stated position, not automatic proof about prior contact or control.
- Disengagement
- A behavioral reduction or end of participation in a harmful or unwanted role. It may occur without complete ideological change and should be distinguished from deradicalization.
Scenario modeling and systems thinking
9 definitions- Scenario
- A conditional description of how a system could change under stated assumptions, evidence, rules, and uncertainty. It is not automatically a prediction.
- Model card
- A compact disclosure of a model’s purpose, state, data, assumptions, rules, outputs, uncertainty, verification, validation, rights implications, accessibility alternative, correction path, and unsupported interpretations.
- Agent-based model
- A model in which actors or nodes follow explicit local rules and aggregate behavior emerges from their interactions. It must not turn identity or diagnosis into a risk proxy.
- Compartmental model
- A model that represents movement between declared aggregate states or compartments over time. Its categories and transition assumptions must remain visible.
- Event sourcing
- A state-management pattern that preserves an ordered event history so prior state can be reconstructed, compared, corrected, and replayed.
- Verification
- Evidence that a model implementation follows its declared rules and computes the intended transformation correctly.
- Validation
- Evidence that a model is sufficiently credible for its stated purpose and truth boundary. Validation is purpose-specific and does not establish universal truth.
- Uncertainty quantification
- The explicit characterization of uncertainty arising from data, assumptions, parameters, model structure, disagreement, and missing evidence.
- Sensitivity analysis
- A test of how model outputs change when assumptions, parameters, evidence, or rules are varied within declared ranges.
International fairness
27 definitions- Equal evidence burden
- The rule that every country, institution, authority, and community is evaluated with comparable sourcing, uncertainty, rights, and correction standards.
- Formal authority
- Power or responsibility established by a constitution, statute, treaty, regulation, charter, published policy, or other official instrument.
- Practical authority
- Power or influence exercised in practice, which may differ from the authority described in formal documents.
- Endonym
- A name used by a place, institution, people, or language community for itself. The publication records endonyms where useful and avoids imposing one naming convention as universally neutral.
- Affected-community context
- Evidence and perspective from people or communities that experience the consequences of an institution, policy, operation, or reform.
- Rights review
- A comparison of powers, safeguards, oversight, remedies, documented impacts, and uncertainty rather than a simple threat ranking.
- Regional baseline
- A provisional regional overview used when a country does not yet have a dedicated, locally sourced profile. It is explicitly less specific than a country profile.
- World context
- A multi-lens description of place, people, institutions, economy, infrastructure, and environment used to improve orientation without deriving alignment, morality, danger, or rank.
- Archival snapshot
- A preserved dataset representing a collection at a stated time. It may contain fields from different estimate years and must not be presented as a live current feed.
- Estimate year
- The year associated with a specific statistic or source field. It is separate from the release or snapshot year of the collection that contains it.
- Source code
- An identifier preserved exactly as imported from a source. It is not automatically a unique or authoritative standard code; IARPG uses a separate stable entity identifier when collisions exist.
- Entity class
- A declared distinction among roadmap countries, territories or dependencies, special areas, oceans or global records, and supranational institutions so unlike records are not silently collapsed.
- Country context proposal
- A dated, source-by-source current-context draft that remains separate from the archival baseline and is not live intelligence or verified current truth until independent review supports publication.
- Balanced current-country batch
- A set of country-context drafts selected through a declared neutral method and reviewed for comparable evidence, language, uncertainty, rights, oversight, remedy, affected-community visibility, source diversity, and review burden. It does not claim statistical or regional representativeness.
- Research cutoff
- The exact date and time boundary after which a current-country proposal makes no claim to include later officeholder, legal, budget, membership, policy, or event changes.
- Claim support
- The declared relationship between a source and a bounded observation, including whether support is direct, partial, contextual, contradictory, or unresolved, plus a locator and scope note.
- Translation method
- The recorded way a source was reviewed across languages, such as an official parallel page or machine-assisted translation, including limits and the need for locally informed review.
- Non-external perspective
- A locally authored, local-language, affected-community, domestic institutional, or otherwise internally situated source perspective used to reduce one-sided external framing.
- Fail-closed publication gate
- A structural control that blocks publication while required evidence metadata, uncertainty, rights, oversight, affected communities, reviewer provenance, consent, source verification, adjudication, corrections, or perspective diversity are incomplete. Passing a structural check does not prove factual accuracy or approval.
- Perspective origin
- The declared relationship of a source to the country, institution, or community it describes, such as local, affected-community, official domestic, regional, external, or international.
- Current-country evidence audit
- An additive dated review of preserved current-country claims that records claim dispositions, new source metadata, contradiction searches, resolution tests, corrections, and unresolved reviewer questions without silently rewriting the original proposal.
- Corroborated with qualification
- A claim disposition indicating that current evidence supports the bounded core of a statement but requires narrower wording, attribution, scope, implementation caveats, or an explicit unresolved condition.
- Locally informed review packet
- A structured unanswered request for real reviewer evidence about local language, institutions, practice, affected communities, conflicts, consent, and claim wording. Its fields must remain blank until an actual reviewer supplies the information.
- Reviewer evidence
- A real person’s bounded claim-level response with declared identity or consented anonymity, relevant relationship or experience, language and translation context, conflicts, consent, rationale, requested wording, and evidence scope. It is never generated or inferred by the model.
- Editorial adjudication
- A separate accountable decision that records the evidence considered, rationale, wording effect, publication effect, and appeal or correction route without rewriting the underlying reviewer submission.
- Publication scope
- The specific permission granted for retaining, quoting, paraphrasing, attributing, anonymizing, or publishing reviewer material. Consent to participate does not automatically grant any broader publication permission.
- Volatile claim recheck
- A dated re-evaluation of a time-sensitive claim against current authoritative sources. It remains separate from the original proposal, prior audit, human review, and editorial adjudication, and may retain, qualify, correct, supersede, or leave a claim unresolved.
World systems, governance, and resilience
9 definitions- Implementation gap
- The difference between a formally adopted rule or policy and what institutions can or do implement in practice. It must be explained with evidence and alternatives rather than treated as proof of intent or national character.
- Domestic alignment coalition
- The changing group of institutions, parties, constituencies, economic interests, and communities that supports or constrains an external policy. It is not the same as the opinion of an entire country.
- Small-state agency
- Influence exercised through procedure, law, coalition building, geography, specialization, chairmanship, hosting, issue linkage, or normative leadership despite limited aggregate material power.
- Domain-specific dependency
- Reliance within a declared domain such as energy, food, finance, logistics, technology, labor, data, or emergency support. It does not automatically establish political control or universal alignment.
- Substitutability
- The availability, cost, time, infrastructure, legal permission, and institutional capacity required to replace a supplier, route, service, or system after disruption.
- Intelligence source reliability
- An assessment of an intelligence source’s access, provenance, competence, motivation, and performance record. It is evaluated separately from the credibility of any individual claim.
- Information credibility
- An assessment of whether a specific claim is independently corroborated, consistent, plausible but unverified, contradicted, manipulated, fabricated, superseded, or unknown.
- Crisis cascade
- A conditional sequence in which an initial disruption affects connected systems, institutions, information environments, communities, and recovery pathways. A cascade model is not an inevitable prediction.
- Correction trigger
- A declared observation, threshold, contradiction, or review event that requires an assessment, policy, model, or fictional campaign state to be revised, paused, reversed, or superseded.
Information environments and public reasoning
6 definitions- Information environment
- The institutions, infrastructures, media, platforms, languages, relationships, rules, and social practices through which information is created, distributed, interpreted, challenged, corrected, and acted upon.
- Distribution is not persuasion
- Reach, forwarding, engagement, or visibility can establish circulation but does not by itself establish belief, endorsement, attitude change, public opinion, or behavioral effect.
- Source-authored review state
- A label such as Final or Finalized applied inside a supplied source. It records the source author’s own state and does not establish repository review, independent verification, local acceptance, or publication approval.
- Information void
- A situation in which timely, credible, accessible, and locally meaningful information is absent or insufficient, leaving people and institutions to reason from partial evidence, rumor, experience, or informal networks.
- Translation uncertainty
- Uncertainty introduced when meaning crosses languages, scripts, registers, legal systems, or cultural contexts. It should be recorded separately from factual disagreement or deceptive intent.
- Correction and supersession
- A visible record that identifies what changed, why it changed, which evidence supports the revision, and whether the prior claim remains historical context, is qualified, or is replaced.
Publication and memory
10 definitions- IARPG
- Intelligence Agent Role Playing Game: a fictional international intelligence-operations game concept and open design publication.
- IARPG-OPS-2
- The current operations design-system family for missions, evidence, roles, authorities, simulation, extraction, debriefing, integrity, migration, and publication.
- Canonical record
- The current authoritative representation of a standard, mission, role, authority, schema, or other publication object.
- Canonical JSON
- A deterministic JSON representation that normalizes ordering and values so integrity digests and comparisons can be reproduced.
- Deterministic simulation
- A simulation whose seed, states, transitions, meter changes, and reason codes can be replayed to obtain the same declared result.
- Conformance level
- A staged measure of whether a mission is briefable, playable, auditable, and simulatable under the current standard.
- UAI memory
- The repository’s structured AI-readable memory system. Active .uai records provide compact startup truth; durable documents provide reviewed depth.
- Hot memory
- Compact, current, first-load project context stored in .uai files and consulted at startup and handoff.
- Long-term memory
- Detailed reviewed knowledge stored under /docs/long-term-memory/, including reports, architecture, decisions, research, and implementation history.
- Work in progress
- A release state that has useful implementation and evidence but still has unresolved promotion gates, target-host checks, or independent validation needs.
