Glossary

Terms used across this site, in the sense in which ESFI uses them. Format terms follow the Specification 0.7 of the Machine Page Format; where a term comes from one of the topics, the entry points to it.

Capability levels

The four levels at which an institution can hold a capability: operate (run it in normal conditions), maintain (keep it healthy and recover from routine faults), change (adapt it when requirements or conditions change) and judge (evaluate work done by others on its behalf). A handover that delivers only the first level leaves the institution exposed at the other three. See Capability transfer.

Companion

The word has three uses on ESFI’s sites.

Companion, capitalised, is the name of ESFI’s work on machine publishing, explained at companion.esfi.eu. Machine Page Format (MPF) is its first implemented format.

A companion file, or companion representation, is the machine-readable representation published beside a human-facing resource. In MPF, the .mpf file is the companion of an HTML page. The human page remains the canonical address; the companion is its declared parallel.

A companion, as in A Companion’s View, is a machine reader acting on behalf of people: the audience a companion file is written for.

`companion-scope`

MPF frontmatter declaring the processing the publisher intends: cite, summarize, train, index and relay, each true or false. It records intent. It is not enforced by the format, it is not a technical lock, and it does not replace applicable law.

Confidence

Optional MPF frontmatter stating the publisher’s own assessment of the content. The reference implementation accepts confirmed, probable, speculative and contested. It is a declaration; MPF does not calculate or validate it.

Content ID

A stable identity for the logical content behind a page, independent of its URL, language and file. By default the reference implementation generates it as <content-id-prefix>:page:<slug>, with locale prefixes removed, so translations of the same route share one content ID.

Content parity

MPF frontmatter stating how the machine body relates to the human-visible page: whether it is represented in the HTML, whether it comes from human-visible content, and whether it contains sections served to machines only. Machine-only content is declared automatically, so it cannot acquire authority unnoticed.

Declaration

A statement a publisher makes about its own resource: provenance, confidence, processing scope, parity, lifecycle. A declaration is a receipt, never a verdict. It records precisely what the publisher says; it does not establish that what it says is true. A system that reads declarations should keep them distinct from independently verified facts. See AI-readiness and How to read our claims.

Degraded state

A reduced mode of operation, designed in advance, in which an essential function continues at a defined minimum while other capabilities are suspended. It states what must hold, what may stop, for how long, and who decides to enter and leave it. See Resilience.

Dependency

The relationship between an essential function and something it relies on that the institution may not control: a system, an operator, a route, a platform, an authority, a supplier. In ESFI’s work the dependency, not the supplier, is the object of sovereignty. See Sovereignty.

Essential function

What an institution must be able to keep doing, named precisely: issuing payments, coordinating an emergency response, publishing authoritative information. Resilience and sovereignty are properties of an essential function, not of an inventory of assets. See Resilience.

Failure domain

The set of components, people or procedures that can be removed by the same event. Two paths in the same failure domain are duplicates, not independent alternatives. See Resilience.

Failure envelope

The conditions under which a resilience result holds: starting state, what was removed, for how long, expected minimum service, observed outcome, residual dependencies and recovery path. A result inside one envelope does not prove resilience outside it. See Resilience.

Judgement

The state in which a person, an institution or a system can evaluate work, claims or evidence produced by others and reach a defensible decision on its own.

Judgement is not a skill acquired once or a document received at handover. It is a state of maturity that has to be reached and maintained through practice. An institution in this state can tell whether a supplier’s proposal is sound, whether a repair was done properly, whether a claim about control or resilience is supported by the evidence behind it, and which evidence would settle the question if it is not.

The same applies to systems. A system that informs decisions, whether it monitors, recommends or procures, must be able to distinguish a declaration from a verified fact. A system that cannot will pass the confusion on to everyone who relies on it.

In ESFI’s work, bringing every participant in a process to the point where they can exercise judgement is the condition under which capability remains after we leave. See Six questions we ask, Capability transfer and Sovereignty.

Language variant

An expected MPF address of the same logical content in another configured language, listed in language-variants. The reference implementation generates these addresses from configuration; generating them does not verify that every translated file exists.

Machine publishing contract

The minimum set of declarations that lets a machine identify and use a public resource without reconstructing the publisher’s intent: identity, discovery, provenance, processing scope, parity and freshness. MPF is ESFI’s implemented form of this contract for web pages. See AI-readiness.

`mpf-id`

The SHA-256 identifier of a generated MPF file, computed over the complete serialised document before the mpf-id field itself is inserted. It identifies the MPF representation, not the source HTML.

Provenance

Required MPF frontmatter stating how the publisher describes the origin of the content: human, ai-assisted or ai-generated. It is a declaration; MPF carries it and does not verify it.

Reference implementation

The implementation whose actual behaviour the MPF specification describes. For MPF this is mpf-build, published at git.esfi.eu/esfi/mpf. Where descriptive convenience and implementation behaviour differ for a published version, the specification and the implementation are brought back into agreement.

`source-hash`

The SHA-256 digest of the raw source HTML read by the builder. It identifies the exact source bytes used to generate an MPF file, and makes drift between the human page and its companion visible. It is distinct from mpf-id.

Status markers

The labels used in the MPF section of this site. Specification 0.7: defined in the published specification. Reference implementation: behaviour of mpf-build not yet described in the specification text. ESFI practice: a deployment convention used on ESFI sites, outside the builder and the specification. See Overview.

Structural gap

A problem that persists not because it is invisible but because the mechanism to address it does not exist, typically between institutions, between a strategy and its operating model, or across a border. Closing it would require an existing institution to step outside what it was built to do. See Where the work begins.

Substitution boundary

What would have to move, change or coexist for an essential function to leave its current dependency without losing capability, data, identity, security or recovery. A dependency is substitutable only when this boundary has been worked through. An alternative on the market is not an exit. See Sovereignty.