Glossary
Plain-English definitions of terms you'll encounter in Spinosa.
Plain-English definitions of the terms you see most often. This page stays short on purpose. For full explanations, follow the linked canonical pages.
Core terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Corpus | Your source collection: PDFs, transcripts, notes, images, and related research files. See Corpus Structure. |
| Workspace | The local folder Spinosa creates from your corpus, including raw/, maps/, system/, and agent_reports/. See Corpus Structure. |
| Orchestrator | The top-level coordinator that decides which agents should run for a request. See Agents & Pipeline. |
| Pipeline | The sequence of agent steps used to answer a given request. See Agents & Pipeline. |
| Sub-agent | A specialized helper such as Searcher, Analyst, Writer, or Verifier. See Agents & Pipeline. |
Workspace terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| raw/ | Converted local copies of your source documents. This is the evidence layer agents search and cite. |
| maps/ | Navigation maps that help agents find clusters of relevant files and themes. |
| system/ | Settings and index files such as configuration.md, context.md, dictionary.md, and workspace_index.md. |
| Dictionary | The vocabulary list Spinosa builds from the corpus: names, places, organizations, concepts, aliases, and uncertain terms. |
| YAML header | The metadata block at the top of a raw/ file describing source type, language, dates, people, topics, and related fields. |
| Source intake | The workflow for adding new material to an existing workspace without rebuilding everything from scratch. |
Report terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| agent_reports/ | The folder where startup reports, answers, and other report artifacts are written. |
| Evidence packet | An intermediate file that packages candidate quotes and source paths for report drafting. |
| Confidence level | A signal of how directly a passage supports a point: typically high, medium, or low. |
| Verification status | The report outcome after source checking: pending, verified, corrected, or failed. See Reports & Charts. |
Conversion terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| OCR | Optical Character Recognition: turning scanned or image-based text into searchable text. |
| MarkItDown | The converter used for many office, EPUB, HTML, and text-based PDF formats. |
| RapidOCR | The local OCR engine used for scanned PDFs and image-heavy files. |
| Obsidian wikilinks | Double-bracket links like [[filename]] used in navigation maps for graph-style browsing in Obsidian. |
Next reads
- Corpus Structure for workspace layout and file roles
- Agents & Pipeline for agent names and responsibilities
- Reports & Charts for report anatomy and statuses
- FAQ if you came here because something is confusing or broken
