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Glossary — decision-canon v0.1
Alternative
A candidate action, intervention, non-action, delegation, investigation, or combination available within a decision frame.
Authority
The legitimate permission to make, approve, constrain, delegate, or execute a decision within a defined scope.
Bet
A decision that knowingly accepts unresolved uncertainty in pursuit of expected benefit.
Capability
What an actor or system is technically able to do.
Capability does not imply authority.
Commitment
The point at which an authorized actor or mechanism adopts an intention or selects a course of action.
Constitutional decision
A decision that changes the rules governing authority, policy creation, governance, or the modification of foundational constraints.
Decision
An authorized commitment made in response to a framed situation.
Decision analysis
The structured evaluation of alternatives using evidence, models, values, uncertainty, and one or more analytical methods.
Decision graph
A network of Decision Objects linked by typed relationships such as governed-by, authorized-by, supersedes, or learned-from.
Decision lineage
The trace from an observed action or outcome back through the decision, authority, delegation, policy, and constitutional structures that enabled or constrained it.
Decision modelling
Representation of the decision situation, world, uncertainty, causal relationships, alternatives, values, and constraints.
Decision Object
A persistent semantic representation of a decision and its relevant context, reasoning, authority, commitment, effects, and learning.
Decision quality
The quality of a decision given the frame, information, values, uncertainty, reasoning, and authority available at decision time.
It is distinct from outcome quality.
Decision taking
The act or mechanism by which a recommendation or open choice becomes an authorized commitment.
Delegation
The transfer or bounded assignment of decision authority from one actor or authority source to another.
Effect
A change intended to occur because of a decision.
Effects may include actions, allocations, permissions, constraints, delegations, or policy changes.
Epistemic state
The collection of observations, assumptions, estimates, beliefs, uncertainties, and models available at a particular time.
Experiment
A decision or action taken primarily to acquire information or reduce uncertainty.
Formality level
A description of how deeply a decision is structured, analyzed, governed, or made executable.
Initial levels range from D0 to D7.
Frame
The representation of what situation is being decided, including scope, boundaries, horizon, assumptions, exclusions, and stakeholders.
Governance
The authority, approval, delegation, escalation, oversight, and accountability structure surrounding a decision.
Outcome
What actually happened after a decision and its execution.
Policy
A reusable rule or rule system that constrains, permits, requires, defaults, incentivizes, delegates, or escalates classes of future actions or decisions.
Policy decision
A decision whose important effect is the creation, modification, or removal of policy.
Progressive formalization
The principle that a common semantic model should allow a decision to acquire additional structure only when warranted.
Reversibility
The degree to which the effects of a decision can be undone, including reversal cost and delay.
Uncertainty
Lack of certainty regarding states, outcomes, models, causal relationships, preferences, or future events.
Value model
The objectives, preferences, constraints, thresholds, vetoes, and tradeoffs against which alternatives are assessed.