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Appendix B — Glossary and Failure Atlas

This appendix is the vocabulary of the book in one place. Definitions summarize the teaching text; SPEC.md remains normative.

B.1 Core Terms

address space

A named domain in which a hash has meaning. RAPP stores and dereferences by (space, hash), never by a bare 64-hex string.

authorship

The claim that a particular key signed an artifact. Authorship requires a valid §10 signature and does not by itself prove that the key was authorized.

authority

The right of a signer to make a decision at a particular time. RAPP derives authority from the authenticated registry and its owner-succession records.

biography stream

A body stream identified directly by a rappid. It chains particles through prev; prev_wave is null.

canonical form

The one RFC 8785 JCS byte representation of an admissible I-JSON value.

consumer

An implementation that validates frames, eggs, signatures, registry state, and all refusal conditions before accepting input.

content address

A SHA-256 digest computed in a named RAPP domain over canonical values or raw octets. The address changes if the addressed content changes.

domain separation

Prefixing hash input with an exact space tag and newline so the same bytes in different roles have different addresses.

egg

A rapp/1-egg manifest plus, for tree variants, deterministic stored-ZIP contents. An egg packages an organism, rapplication, session, invite, neighborhood, or estate.

estate

A governed collection of RAPP organisms and neighborhoods sharing an authenticated registry and owner succession.

fail closed

Refuse or report unknown when required evidence is malformed, missing, unreachable, stale, or unverifiable. Never convert inability to check into a pass.

frame

The closed eleven-field RAPP event envelope. It carries a payload particle, a whole-frame wave, chain links, and an optional signature.

freshness

Confidence that authenticated mutable state is recent enough for a decision. A valid registry signature proves authenticity, not freshness.

genesis

The sequence-zero frame from which the current live chain descends. Every stream has exactly one non-deprecated genesis entry in the registry.

head

The highest verified frame descending from the registered genesis. Consumers persist heads to detect rollback and silent reorganization.

identity

Continuity across changing content. In RAPP, identity is the minted tail of a rappid, not its human-readable owner/slug.

integrity

Evidence that bytes or chain links have not changed. Integrity does not imply authorship.

I-JSON

The interoperable JSON profile from RFC 7493 on which RAPP canonicalization is defined.

JCS

JSON Canonicalization Scheme, RFC 8785. It fixes member order, escaping, number form, and whitespace so a value has one serialized form.

kind

A registered noun.verb event name. The registry, not the prefix alone, binds a kind to its stream family.

legacy form

A historical encoding that is not the one current canonical form. Live legacy is drift; sealed re-genesis history is retained evidence, not a compatibility dialect.

particle

H("rapp/1:particle", payload), stored as payload_hash. It addresses what happened and links a worldline through prev.

producer

An implementation that emits only current canonical values, addresses, identities, frames, and egg variants.

provisional identity

A legacy rappid that can be recognized while reading but whose tail is not a conformant 64 lowercase hex characters. It must not be emitted; becoming current requires owner-authorized re-anchoring.

rappid

The self-locating RAPP identifier rappid:@<owner>/<slug>:<64-lowercase-hex>. Its tail is minted from UUIDv4 octets or SPKI DER, never from the owner/slug name.

re-anchor

An owner-authorized identity transition for exactly one allowed case: provisional upgrade, key rotation, key compromise, or pre-standard key-tag migration.

re-genesis

The owner-authorized convergence operation that seals an old chain, publishes a new sequence-zero frame, updates the registry, and retires the old bytes under legacy/.

registry

The signed, append-only estate root of trust for keys, kinds, genesis records, re-anchors, tombstones, owner succession, and canonical-source pointers.

router/mirror

An implementation that transports or serves RAPP artifacts without inventing endpoints or rewriting addressed bytes.

stream

An append-only sequence of frames sharing one stream_id.

swarm stream

A shared net:* stream. It chains particles through prev, waves through prev_wave, and requires a signature on every frame.

tombstone

An owner-signed registry record that revokes a keyed rappid from revoked_utc forward.

wave

H("rapp/1:wave", frame - {frame_hash, sig}), stored as frame_hash. It addresses the exact unsigned envelope and protects wire integrity.

worldline

The particle-linked history of an organism or stream.

B.2 Address Spaces

A bare digest should always make you ask: in which space?

B.3 Frame Verification Failure Atlas

The step is a refusal location, not a repair instruction. Correct the producer or perform an authorized migration; do not mutate the received frame until it passes.

B.4 Notation

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