The undercarriage of a tracked excavator: the drive sprocket, track chain and rollers

Glossary

Every word, defined once.

The register runs on a small vocabulary, used the same way on every page. Each word is defined once, here.

01The vocabulary

Sector: The top division of the register, and the first letter of every number: C Construction, O Office, A Agriculture, P Professions, T Trades & crafts, S Self. Each sector holds its own list of trades and its own family table on each track. Opening a sector, a family or a trade is a register decision; a code is never renamed and never reused.
Source: Whose way of working a skill set is. On Hands, the person. On Machine, the house whose package it is. On Records, either a named person's practice — the person, named on the Card, and the name stays on it — or a company's records, coded and never named publicly. A Source is never a tile.
Owner: Even Steven owns what is made of every skill — the recorded session, the converted paper, the taught package — on every track, for the person or company the skill came from; the skill itself stays the person's, and holds the consents. Every Card reads Owned by Even Steven. A licensee is not an owner, and neither is Tacit Tessera.
Collector: The house that brought a skill set to the register. Steady Eddie collects Hands skill sets and supplies its own Machine packages; Strategic Agent collects Records. The mark on a tile is the collector's — SE or SA. Even Steven's mark, ES, sits on a tile it collected — Even Steven collects hands with the Trainer it adopts from Steady Eddie.
Skill source collector: What Strategic Agent is. It captures the skill set of a professional from the corpus that professional retained over a career and mined into a reference — an engineer's calculations, reports, specifications and job files — and it does the same for a company's records. It turns a skill source into a reference that answers with named sources and refuses when the records do not support an answer. Even Steven owns what is made of the skill; Tacit Tessera numbers and licenses it.
House: One of the three companies in the chain: Even Steven, Steady Eddie, Strategic Agent. Steady Eddie and Strategic Agent require skill sets. Even Steven owns them. Tacit Tessera licenses them to OEMs and to AI. A house is not a Source.
Licensee: Who runs a skill set under licence, and there are two kinds. An OEM: a maker, a kit company, a fleet owner, a business that runs a machine. And an AI: a platform, an agent builder, a command centre that runs a Records set. Both get the same thing — a numbered, sealed edition, a count of every use, and the seal check.
Tacit Tessera: The brand, the system, and the words in front of every number. Written in full, every time. The brand name in front is what keeps this register distinct from anything of a similar name.
Tacit Tessera number: The address of one skill set: Tacit Tessera C H 3 001 MN · 1 for a reader, CH3001MN1Q for a machine. The machine form is ten characters. Only the register issues one. A number is never reused, and on the Hands track it sits beside the person's name, never instead of it.
Track: Which kind of skill set a number holds. H is Hands: a named person's way of running one family of machine. M is Machine: a way of working taught to or loaded on a machine. R is Records: a reference built from a body of paper. A sector says which tracks it carries.
Family: One digit, set within a sector and a track. On Hands and Machine it is the family of machine; on Records it is the kind of record, or the seat in Office and the profession in Professions. Family zero is always a Set.
Trade: The two letters that say what field the work is in — civil earthworks, for instance — rather than the machine it runs on. Each sector lists the trades it uses. A different trade earns a new number.
Check character: The tenth and last character of the machine form. It lets a person or a machine tell a mistyped number from a real one before the register is asked anything. It is computed, never typed.
Card: The sealed formula for one edition of one skill set. Every Card carries five lines above its detail — Sector, Source, Collected by, Owned by Even Steven, Licensed by Tacit Tessera. The public side shows the number, the name, the status, the tile and a scope statement. The rest is the licensee's side.
Tile: The machined plate that carries the number. The mark on it is the collector's. Each family has its own band of hues, the colour is recorded on the Card rather than worked out again, and the number is always printed, so colour never carries meaning alone.
Mosaic: A Set of tiles licensed under one paper, with family zero in its own number. Every member keeps its own number, its own count and its own name. A set is a shelf, not a stew.
Edition: A dated, frozen version of a number. The same number and edition behave the same way everywhere, or the register says why not. A licence pins an edition.
The Tacit Tessera Book: The catalogue: every number in the register with its plate, its Card and its collector, sorted by sector, track, family and trade. A register, not a marketplace.
Operator: The role of the person in the seat. It is this site's word for that role, and it is not swapped for user, driver or worker.
Hand: A person. It is the word the plain-words pages use — ask for a hand by name — and it never means a company.
Sealed: Closed and fixed when an edition is issued, so that what was published can be told apart from what was not. A Card is sealed with its edition, and its seal can be checked.
Verify: The public check, at tacittessera.com/verify/ followed by the ten characters of the machine form. It answers four things and nothing else: whether the check character is valid, whether the register knows the number, its status, and whether the edition is current. Nothing is kept as a verdict.
Consent: Four separate papers, each given and ended on its own: to be recorded; to be held alongside others; to run under the person's name; and to be used to train a model. Even Steven holds them, never the register.
Ratify: The second capture route on the Records track. The agent drafts method statements from the paper already mined, and the person accepts, amends or declines each one; every ratified statement is authored and dated. Nobody is interviewed and nobody is recorded to build a Records set.
Withdrawal: A Source ending a permission, exercised with Even Steven. On the Hands and Machine tracks: It stops for new work at once; a job already underway finishes. Two dates are kept and never collapsed into one — the out-of-service date, the day the job already underway has finished and nothing runs it anywhere, and the true date, the day every copy is gone, backups included. On the Records track it takes effect at the next serve. It is never a breach and nobody can extend it.
Release: The sealed package that goes to a machine. It is built for the controls the machine already has, carries no recording, and is chosen by name before the work starts — no default, no last-used. It proposes, a person authorizes, safety has veto. It does not learn in the field.
The count: The record of every hour a skill set runs, and of every serve made from a Records set. The act that clears a machine to work is the act that starts the count, and one signed row serves as clearance, invoice and pay. The count is the economic record.
The physical Tacit Tessera: Two objects made for a skill set at issue and posted to its Source: the plate, the tile made solid at 70 × 44 × 4 mm, and the wallet card, CR80 at 85.6 × 54 mm. Neither is a credential, and none has been made. Set out on the plate and the card.
The command centre: The customer's own working room where a licensed Records set runs. It is Strategic Agent's own product, on its own site at strategicagent.ca, and it is not described here.
Specified: The one public status word. It means a skill set is written down and numbered, and that nothing has been run, licensed, metered or paid against it. Every entry in the Book reads Specified.

Where the mechanism behind one of these words is set out at length, it is set out on how numbering works, license, meter or protect. The numbers themselves are in the Tacit Tessera Book.