Glossary

The core vocabulary of the platform. Each term links the concept to where it lives in the docs.

Term	Meaning
Atelier	The platform: declare an application as data, and Atelier generates the running, multi-tenant product — staff console, citizen portal, and APIs.
Entity	A declared type with a schema — fields, relationships, declarative links, and states. The data plane; the nouns of your application.
View	A declared, reusable query over your data — filters, aggregates, group-bys, and joins. The basis for analytics and public tallies.
Action	A gated, audited operation declared with parameters, preconditions, edits, creates, side effects, and placements. The execution plane; the verbs of your application.
Placement	The part of an action that projects it onto a surface as a button or a form. Any action can be placed on any compatible surface.
Surface	A screen or destination an application presents — an admin page, a portal page, or a public surface — composed from widgets. The surface plane.
Widget	A reusable rendering block (list, table, chart, map, form, and more). Any entity can be rendered by any compatible widget.
Block	The declarative unit of a surface: a spec that the renderer dispatches to the right widget. Surfaces are composed as blocks.
Renderer	The single shared rendering layer that drives both the staff console and the citizen portal, so the two stay visually consistent.
Vertical Sheet	A single declarative document expressing one application across all of its planes — entities, actions, surfaces, notifications, analytics, and portal.
Vocabulary	The shared catalog of types and registries every application draws from.
Template	One complete, worked example application. New tenants are created by forking it.
Tenant	An independent, isolated instance of an application, created by forking the template and then editable on its own.
Fork	The one-shot operation that copies the template into a new tenant and rewires it to run standalone.
Notification event / rule / template	The notification model: actions emit events, rules subscribe to them, and templates render the message — all declared as data.
Submission	A durable record of an in-flight create or long-running request, completed reliably by the workflow backend.
Workflow	A long-running, retryable, human-in-the-loop process, executed on Atelier's durable-execution backend (Martha).
Public surface	A declared, strictly-scoped read surface that exposes specific entities or views to the citizen portal — and nothing more.
Authorization as data	Access policy declared alongside your entities and compiled into every query; tenant-isolated and fail-closed by construction.
Identity	The signals that establish who a caller is — their tenant, their roles, and their organization membership — which drive authorization.
Diagnostics	Built-in validation and health checks that confirm a declaration is well-formed and an application comes up correctly.