The question behind the term
Architecture language compresses assumptions. “Offline,” “tenant,” “audit,” “encrypted” and “realtime” can sound precise while different readers attach incompatible meanings.
A reviewable approach
Define a term beside its scope and counterexample. A durable cursor is a stored position in an ordered change stream; it does not guarantee that every event in the whole system shares one global order. Forced row-level security is database policy applied even to table owners unless explicitly bypassed; it does not control every external store.
- E2EE: only participant endpoints hold content-reading keys
- Idempotency: repeating an operation does not repeat its effect
- Tenant isolation: one organization cannot observe another’s scoped state
- Tamper-evident: unauthorized change can be detected, not made impossible
The boundary to keep visible
A glossary supports shared review but does not replace a threat model, protocol specification, clinical safety case or deployment agreement.