Glossary terms and common misreadings
These definitions explain Nitsor’s plans, data records and workflow terms. The last column distinguishes each term from a common misreading.| Term | Definition | Common misreading |
|---|---|---|
| Account (workspace) | A team: the unit that holds memberships, grants, credentials, storage connections and projects. | It is not a person’s identity; a person can belong to several accounts. |
| Adjudication | Settling a disagreement between independent readers. Nitsor has no adjudication stage: the pipeline designer does not offer adjudicate, and neither the editor nor the public API records an adjudication decision. | A review stage has one reviewer per Task; nothing settles a disagreement between reviewers. |
| Agent | Any non-human principal: an agent credential a workspace issued, or a hosted model Agent on the roster. Retired, never deleted. | An agent-readable file does not give an agent permission to act. |
| Agent credential | A bearer token of a service account, issued on Team settings, then Service accounts, with chosen permissions and an expiry; only its hash is stored. That page calls it a token and the guides call it an agent token; the project Access page lists its service account by name as a Service account row. | It is not a person’s sign-in and cannot mint another credential. It reaches no project until a project admin grants its service account a rung. |
| Agent Version | The immutable fingerprint of what a model Agent was: model family, version and image digest. What provenance and a Run name. | The Agent is the teammate; the Agent Version is what it was at the time. |
| Annotation | One identified label object with a geometry kind, a category, answers and provenance; its hash excludes review state. | It is not the source data itself, and a classification answer is not an annotation. |
| Approval mark | A mark or signature recording approval of a Dataset Version for a stated use. | Nitsor records no approval mark or signature; resolving a version does not approve it. |
| Auto-label stage | A runner stage of a pipeline that dispatches a model Agent with a prompt source of points or human-box. | Its output is a proposal a person decides, not an accepted label. |
| Branch | A line of events inside a project’s version graph; main is protected; at most 256 uncommitted events, with a safety checkpoint at 240. | A branch name is not a permission. |
| Capabilities | The anonymous answer of GET /api/v1/capabilities: product version, topology, formats, limits and per-route minimum versions. | Reading it grants nothing. |
| Certificate | A statement that a model’s calibrated rate bound holds. | Nitsor issues no calibration certificate or calibrated uncertainty guarantee on proposals. |
| Checkpoint | The act of closing a range of branch events into a commit; also the commit kind the generic public commit door writes. | It is not approval. |
| Chunk | A 16 MiB slice of a Dataset Version’s data, the unit of digest verification. | A chunk is never read without its digest being checked. |
| Clearance | An account’s recorded assertion that a principal may see data carrying one marking; checked after the grant check. | It is not a grant. |
| Commit | A checkpointed range of branch events with a content root, parents, an author principal and a kind. Happens when a Task ends with something to record. | It is not automatically approved, and nobody presses a commit button. |
| Commit rule | The field on a Dataset Version naming which rule chose its commit. head-stopgap pins the branch head at creation. | Pinning the branch head does not prove that all work is complete. |
| Community | The free, self-hosted plan. You run Nitsor on your infrastructure and pay your hosting, storage and compute costs. Nitsor runs no hosted compute for Community, and nothing is metered. | Nitsor’s Python SDK and application code are source-available under FSL-1.1-ALv2, not open source. The bundled Convex backend is licensed separately by Convex under its own FSL-1.1-ALv2. |
| Consensus round | Several independent reads of the same work. Nitsor has no consensus stage: the pipeline designer does not offer consensus-read, and neither the editor nor the public API records a consensus vote. | It is not a review verdict; review records one verdict per row from one reviewer. |
| Content root | The SHA-256 that fingerprints the content a commit covers: asset, instruction, label, project-metadata, review, taxonomy and workflow roots. | It is not the commit id; the two are intentionally distinct. |
| Control plane | The Convex deployment that records events, references, hashes, Decisions and Tasks. It never holds a voxel. | It is separate from source-image storage, which reads happen against directly. |
| Credential handle | An account-owned record binding a storage location and prefix to a read or read-write role and a protected credential source. | Customer keys are encrypted after submission by an owner or admin. Its sch_ id is not a bucket key, and an agent credential cannot add or change the key or enable writing. |
| Dataset | A named selection over one branch of a project, with up to seven clause kinds and an optional holdout, revised by compare-and-set. | It is not a copy of anything. |
| Dataset Version | A Dataset applied at one commit: an immutable manifest with a digest per chunk, a stats block and a class index, identified by five hashes. | It records no approval or signature for a stated use. |
| Decision | The recorded result of one authorization check: allow or deny, policy, reason code, resource, scope and principal. Served by the API. | It explains a result; it does not authenticate anyone. |
| Enterprise | A plan from $12,000 a year plus a volume commitment, with deployment, support terms, security and procurement documentation agreed with sales. | Enterprise billing does not use the Team checkout. |
| Field | A typed value slot in the taxonomy (boolean, select, multi-select, numeric, text) scoped to study, series, image or object. | A field value is not an annotation. |
| Geometry kind | The shape of an annotation’s spatial payload: landmark, box2d, box3d, mask, stroke, polygon. | A category declares one kind; a mask is voxels in a writable storage destination, not a drawn outline. |
| Gold | A Task with a known answer used to score annotators. | The router declares gold injection, but Nitsor has no known-answer pool; a sampled route records the candidate as unavailable. |
| Grant | A grant gives a principal access to a project at one rung. Workspace owners and admins also have implicit project admin access; there are no deny rules. | Absence of a row is exclusion, not an error, for everyone else. |
| Holdout | Members a Dataset reserves out of training; the reader skips and counts them; an edit touching one raises an advisory that never blocks. | It is not a train/test split; splits are off-platform. |
| Idempotency key | A caller-supplied key that identifies a retry for writes requiring one; the same key and body replay the first answer for 24 hours; a different body is a conflict. The pin, access, cancel and delete routes take none; see the request conventions. | Reserved namespaces (asset-commit:, safety-checkpoint:) belong to the server. |
| Industrial CT / NDT | Computed-tomography workflows used to inspect manufactured objects without destroying them. Nitsor’s commercial focus. | It does not mean every volumetric workflow is industrial CT. |
| Job | A bounded model-compute request with model family, version and prompt; submitted, running, succeeded, failed or refused. | A Job is not a Task, and a Job without a Run is not a zero bill. |
| Landmark | A point at a position in a volume, identified by its annotationId, with an asset, a class, a note and a review state; upserted and deleted through its own routes. | It is not a mask, box, or full segmentation. |
| Lease | The signed permission a reader holds for one Dataset Version: at most one hour, naming version, manifest hash, principal, installation and allowed shards. | It is not a credential for anything else. |
| Ledger entry | The record tying one accepted event to its Decision and principal. Served by the API. | A Ledger entry exists only for accepted events; denials are Decisions alone. |
| Manifest | A Dataset Version’s member list with a digest per chunk; the pin a reader carries is the version id plus the manifest hash. | A manifest whose hash moves is a different version. |
| Marking | A subtractive restriction a source can carry (export control); it can only remove access. | It is not a grant. |
| MCP (Model Context Protocol) | A standard for connecting AI applications to tools and information sources. | Nitsor has no product MCP server; the docs host answers a documentation-only server at /mcp. |
| Model Agent | A hosted model on Nitsor’s roster (SAM 2.1), provisioned as a principal on every workspace and capped at contribute. | It is not an agent credential; a credential is a token a workspace issues for its own scripts and services. |
| Model-assisted volume | The planned launch pricing unit: one completed scan/model result in a monthly billing period under the scan identity rules, with all objects produced included. | It is not a slice, mask, object or elapsed GPU/runtime. Failed runs and same-period repeats of the same model version on the same scan are free; repeated delivery of the same paid event does not create another charge. This billing policy is not active. |
| Pin | The explicit record that a principal depends on a Dataset Version, written by pin or by the reader on open. | Reads and lookups record nothing. |
| Pipeline | The product’s workflow definition: the stages, roles, transitions with routers, gates and task limit bound to a project branch. | A pipeline is commit content, not a setting. |
| Plan marker | The label at the start of a documentation page naming the plans its content applies to. | It does not change the permissions required to perform an action. |
| Principal | A user, an agent or the system, recorded on every event, Decision and Ledger entry. | An identity is not permission without a grant. |
| Project | The boundary for one version graph, its Tasks and its access rules. | It is not a bucket and not a queue. |
| Project Asset | A label plus one Source Version per series role, recorded in commits; what a Dataset Version proves membership against. | It is not a copy of the Source. |
| Proposal | Model-authored content a Run produced, landing in the editor for a person to accept or correct. | It is not an accepted label. |
| Provenance | Who or what wrote an event, under which Decision, against which earlier state; on an annotation, whether a person or a model produced it. | It is not just an author name or model label. |
| Request (async) | A durable handle (operationId) for an accepted long write, with an operation kind; queued, running, succeeded, failed or cancelled. | The requestId on every answer is one HTTP attempt, not the Request. |
| Review verdict | accept, reject or correct on a row, bound to the hash it judged; a task-level Accept closes the review, with a reason when a rejection stands. Nobody claims a review of work they wrote unless a coordinator directs it, and then the Task records it. | A verdict on content that has since changed is refused, not reattached. |
| Rework | The Task dispatched back to the original annotator when a review closes over a standing rejection. | There is no send-back verb; rework is a consequence of Accept. |
| Run | The dispatch of a Job to the run plane: GPU class, cap, confirmation ceiling, runtime measurements in seconds, settlement and cancellation requests. | Runtime fields such as billableDuration are cost and resource telemetry, not customer billing units. Logs and provider usage are unavailable through the API. |
| Rung | A project-level authority on the ladder read < contribute < operate < admin, held through a grant. | Account roles are separate, except that workspace owners and admins hold admin on every project without a grant. |
| Safety checkpoint | The safety commit the control plane writes when a branch reaches 240 uncommitted events, attributed to the system. | It is not a person’s commit. |
| Service account | The lasting identity a script, a job or an agent acts as: a name, a description, an owner, account permissions, project access and up to 10 live tokens. Tokens can be added, rolled and revoked while the identity stays. It is Active, Disabled (a pause that can be undone) or Retired (permanent, never deleted). A project admin names it on the project’s Access page when giving it access or allowing it to delete Dataset Versions. | It is not a person, and its rung never goes above operate. It cannot hold service-accounts:manage, so it cannot manage service accounts. |
| Shard | A group of eight Dataset Version members: the unit a reader fetches, verifies, caches and replays. | Assignment to readers is per member, not per shard. |
| Single sign-on | Enterprise sign-in through an organization’s SAML or OIDC identity provider connected through WorkOS. | SSO is Enterprise only. Community is designed to sign in through its operator’s own OIDC identity provider, which the self-host stack requires; that stack does not include the Nitsor application. |
| Source | A registered reference to one volume’s objects in a connected bucket, with a content identity (sourceId) and a registration identity (sourceVersionId). | Registration is a reference, not an upload. |
| Source format | The format family detected at registration from headers and extensions. | A recognized format is not always a viewable one. |
| Stats block | The frozen statistics of a Dataset Version, computed at resolve by a named engine version and content-addressed. | Derived counts elsewhere are “as of now” and not quotable. |
| Storage connection | An S3-compatible endpoint, bucket, region, addressing mode, prefix and account-owned credential handle. | Its public record never returns a key value; customer keys are held separately in encrypted form. New customer connections are read-only. |
| Surface | A general word for an interface a caller could reach, such as an API route, command, package, or webhook. | Naming a surface does not mean one is published. |
| Task | One unit of work over a Source at one pipeline stage, with a holder, a lease and a status. Submitting its labels or finishing its review writes a commit. | A completed Task is not a release. |
| Taxonomy | The version-controlled schema of what a project’s annotations may say: categories with geometry kinds, fields and groups, bound per branch and hashed into commits. | It is not an uncontrolled list of label names. |
| Team | A Nitsor-hosted workspace. Planned launch pricing is $649 per workspace per month upfront, or $6,228 per year upfront ($519 monthly equivalent), with 250 volumes per monthly usage period, then $0.25 per additional volume. Extra usage settles monthly; unused included volumes do not carry over or pool for the year. | Unlimited people; no per-person charge. Team does not include SSO. This billing policy is not active. |
| Tombstone | The record left when an admin deletes a Dataset Version: who, when, graceUntil, cleanup state. A fetch answers it instead of a bare not-found. | Access to Nitsor-hosted artifacts ends at the tombstone; links into your bucket expire with the lease. |
| Uncalibrated | A model proposal whose score nothing has calibrated. The editor marks every proposal a model lands this way. | It does not mean wrong. The score is the model’s own and carries no risk guarantee. |
| Viewability | The registration status of a source: viewable, raw (acquisition data with no reconstructed image) or unsupported (recognized by name, not decoded). | Orthogonal to registration failure, which is an outcome with a reason. |
| Volumetric data | Data sampled across three spatial dimensions, such as industrial CT, medical CT, or MRI volumes. | It is not limited to medical imaging. |
| Voxel | One element of a three-dimensional volume, the volumetric equivalent of a pixel. | Voxel-level merging of two masks is not attempted; the conflict is reported. |
| Webhook | An automatic message one system sends to another over the web when a specified event occurs. | One event type is declared in the contract; no delivery exists. |
Next step
Return to the Introduction or search the documentation for the term you need in context.| Plans | All plans |
|---|---|
| Last verified | 2026-10-21 |