Canonical definitions
Use the same words.
Preserve the same boundaries.
A searchable definition set for operation design, evidence, roles, international fairness, publication, and active AI memory.
Direct answer
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
- 49
- Groups
- 5
- Schema
- DefinedTermSet and DefinedTerm
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Terms that carry operational meaning.
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49 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
11 definitions- Evidence packet
- A structured collection of evidence items and their relationships, including origin, time, reliability, confidence, provenance, jurisdiction, and review status.
- 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.
- 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.
International fairness
7 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.
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.
