Glossary

The terms these docs use. SOM's own vocabulary (story, asset, telling, and the rest), as the SOM working group defines it, is in the SOM glossary.

Term	Meaning
Acknowledge (ack)	Tell the bus you're done with a received message, so it's removed from your queue. See HTTPS pull API
App	One of your systems as the bus sees it: an NCS, a graphics renderer, a skill executor. It belongs to your organisation and keeps one identity in every workspace it joins. See Credentials
Asset	A piece of media or derived content in a story (assets[]), identified by an asset_id. Referenced, never carried
AWS role (principal)	An IAM role or user registered on a producer connection, which signs its requests with SigV4 instead of using a secret. It must prove it's yours first. See Authenticate
Causation id	causation_id: the message_id of the message that caused this one
Client id, client secret	A connection's credentials for the token service. The client id is the connection id (c…); the secret starts with sbs_ and is shown once
Configured instance	One skill with one house's values loaded, watching one condition
Connection	One app in one workspace. A producer connection carries the app's system_ids and message types there; a consumer connection has its own queue
Consumer	A system that receives messages from the bus, through a consumer connection filtered by message type
Correlation id	correlation_id: ties a story's messages together; the unit of ordering
Dead-letter queue	Where a message goes after a consumer failed to acknowledge it the connection's number of times (5 by default)
Declaration	The condition a configured instance watches, on one story, while it holds
Dry run	The gateway's checks on a message, without storing or publishing it: the portal Playground, or your workspace's validate route
Envelope	The SOM fields around every payload: version, ids, type, timestamp, originating system, topic
Executor	The code that runs skills for one tool, consuming triggers and publishing warnings
Family	A payload schema, shared by one or more message types: story-context, telling-event, …
Gateway	The bus's single way in, which accepts or refuses each message with a verdict
Grant	What a producer connection may do: the system_ids it may stamp and the message types it may publish
Idempotency	The same message_id with the same content is accepted once; a resend gets 200 duplicate
Identity provider	Your organisation's own OpenID provider, registered by a workspace owner, whose clients can be bound to connections. See Authenticate
Organisation	Your company on the bus. It owns your apps and its workspaces
Overlap	After a secret rotation, the time the previous secret keeps getting tokens
Owner (of a story)	The one system that publishes a story's story.context snapshots
Pending spec	Resting on something SOM 1.0 doesn't define yet, such as a message type with no schema
Preview	RND's pre-release environment
Producer	A system that publishes messages to the bus
Pull API	Reading a consumer connection's queue over HTTPS with its client secret: receive, acknowledge, release
Redrive	Moving messages from a consumer's dead-letter queue back to its queue
Replay	Delivering archived messages to one consumer again, from a point in time
Results statement	A fixed statement of which test-run cases your app passed, against which suite, shared with a publisher or by link. See Results statements
Role (in a workspace)	Viewer, developer, admin or owner: what a member may do in the portal
Rule id	The stable identifier of the check behind a verdict, such as sequence_number.not_increasing
Sandbox	The environment where you test
Skill	A file in the SOM skill library that says what to watch in a story and when to raise a warning
Snapshot	One story.context message: the whole story at one moment
SOM	The Story Object Model, the open message standard for newsrooms. 1.0 was published on 12 September 2026
Suite	What a result was checked against: SOM version and skill library version, such as som-1.0.0+lib-0.2.2
system_id	Identifies one installation of a system, in originating_system. Unique across the bus
Terminal state	KILLED, SPIKED or ARCHIVED: a story in one never becomes live again
Test run	Consumer scenarios or skill cases the bus plays into your vendor workspace, graded case by case. See Test runs
Token service	The bus's own OAuth2 service, which swaps a client id and secret for a one-hour access token. See Token service and workspace API
Tolerated	Accepted, with a warning listed in the 202
Verdict	The bus's answer to a message: accepted, duplicate or refused, with rule ids
Workspace	Your private area on the bus, as a vendor or a publisher: its connections, traffic and stories. Its id (w…) is the {t} in API routes. See Your workspace in the portal