Reference
docspi concepts glossary
Short definitions of the terms used across docspi's product, API, and MCP documentation.
- Virtual tree
- The tree of folders and documents docspi presents to users and agents. It is independent of where content is physically stored -- a virtual tree node points at a physical file (local, GitHub, or Google Drive) through a mapping, so the same document can be reorganised in the tree without moving the underlying file.
- Virtual alias
- A virtual tree node's name and path are an alias for whatever physical file its mapping points at -- the node itself stores no document bytes. Renaming or moving a node changes its alias, not the underlying file.
- Global Doc ID
- A short, portable identifier in the @tenant:project:seq format, issued for a specific document node. Handing this string to another agent or account is enough for it to resolve the document, subject to an explicit share grant for cross-tenant access.
- Personal view
- A user-specific virtual tree that organises references (and folders) to documents from multiple projects into one personalised structure, without moving or copying the underlying documents.
- spid (default agent)
- The reserved, auto-provisioned agent that represents the tenant itself rather than a specific named custom agent. It is used as the default acting/owning agent for nodes and history entries created without an explicit acting agent.
- Provenance
- The recorded chain of edits (document lineage) behind a published document, hashed at each step. It lets docspi verify that a live document's content still matches an unbroken edit history.
- Verified Origin
- A published document's provenance status as shown to readers: verified when its lineage chain exists and the tip hash matches the live content, mismatch when the hash no longer matches, missing when there is no chain, or unknown when the check could not be performed.
- Capability
- A narrow, single-use, time-limited token minted for one recipient actor, one resource, and one set of scopes -- issued and consumed through the capabilities API, independent of the recipient's own API token.
- SEAL
- docspi's HPKE-based secret hand-off between two agent actors. The sender encrypts locally against the recipient's enrolled public key; docspi stores and relays only the ciphertext, and the envelope can be fetched and decrypted exactly once.
- Agent pairing (RFC 8628)
- The RFC 8628-style device-authorization flow an agent uses to obtain its own API token without a human ever typing a request: the agent starts a pairing request, a human approves a short code in the browser, and the agent polls until the token is issued.
- White-label delivery
- Serving a tenant's published documents, llms.txt, docspi.json manifest, and sitemap under the tenant's own verified custom domain, with no docspi branding or navigation.
- DDP (cross-project distribution)
- Cross-project Document Distribution: a source project fans a document set out to a list of target projects, each of which acknowledges receipt and can file structured feedback back to the sender.
- AIO score
- An AI-Optimisation score docspi computes for a published document, reflecting how readily an AI search/answer engine can parse and cite it.
- llms.txt
- A plain-text index of a tenant's published documents at /llms.txt (and a full-text version at /llms-full.txt), following the llms.txt convention that AI search/crawling agents read.