Glossary

A single source of truth for the vocabulary used across Joch documentation. Where a term has a dedicated resource or page, the glossary entry links to it.

A

A2A (Agent-to-Agent) — A protocol for inter-agent communication. Joch persists A2A interactions as Handoff events and exposes them through AOS-compliant hooks.

AgBOM (Agent Bill of Materials) — A machine-readable inventory of every component a Joch agent depends on: models, tools, MCP servers, knowledge sources, memory stores, policies, secrets, and deployments. Joch's AgBOM extends OWASP AgBOM and emits CycloneDX, SPDX, and SWID. See AgBOM.

Agent (Joch resource) — The Joch record of an agent. The agent record is framework-agnostic; the actual agent code lives in OpenAI Agents SDK, Claude Agent SDK, Google ADK, Microsoft Agent Framework, LangGraph, CrewAI, or custom code, and is connected via a FrameworkAdapter. See Agent.

AgBOM — See AgBOM.

AOS (Agent Observability Standard) — The OWASP standard Joch implements for inspect, instrument, and trace. See AOS Conformance.

Approval — A policy-required human review of a side-effecting action (e.g., email.send, github.create_issue). See Approval.

Artifact — Any durable output of an execution (report, dataset, file, image). Stored by reference. See Artifact.

B

Budget — A cost or usage cap that the policy engine enforces before model calls, tool calls, or executions exceed it. See Budget.

C

Control plane — The Joch services that own desired state, policy, inventory, approvals, and release gates. Counterpart to the data plane. See Control Plane.

Conversation — A vendor-neutral, durable record of an agent's dialog. Survives provider migration. See Conversation.

CycloneDX — An OWASP-related BOM standard supported by Joch's AgBOM emitter. See CycloneDX Mapping.

D

Data plane — The Joch services that execute model calls, tool calls, memory reads/writes, RAG retrievals, and trace emission. Counterpart to the control plane. See Data Plane.

Deployment — How many instances of an agent run, where, and at what scale. See Deployment.

E

Environment — A namespace + policy bundle that segments dev / staging / prod. See Environment.

Eval — A scored evaluation of an agent against a dataset, with metrics, thresholds, and an optional release gate. See Eval.

Execution — One concrete run of an agent. Owns model calls, tool calls, memory writes, traces, costs, and artifacts. See Execution.

F

FrameworkAdapter — The Joch resource that connects an agent record to a specific SDK or framework runtime (OpenAI Agents SDK, Claude Agent SDK, Google ADK, Microsoft Agent Framework, LangGraph, CrewAI, custom). See FrameworkAdapter.

G

Guardian Agent — In OWASP AOS terminology, the policy enforcement entity that receives hook calls and returns allow, deny, or modify. In Joch, the Guardian Agent role is filled by the policy engine.

H

Handoff — A transfer of control between agents (A2A). See Handoff.

Hook — In AOS, a synchronous interception point in the agent loop (e.g., agentTrigger, toolCallRequest, toolCallResult, message, memoryContextRetrieval, memoryStore, knowledgeRetrieval). Joch implements all standard AOS hooks at its gateways. See Hooks.

I

Inspect — One of the three AOS pillars: agents publish a current AgBOM that auditors and runtime systems can fetch. Implemented in Joch by the AgBOM service.

Instrument — One of the three AOS pillars: agents expose hooks that a Guardian Agent can use to allow, deny, or modify decisions. Implemented in Joch by the policy engine and the tool / MCP gateways.

Inventory (pillar) — See Inventory.

K

KnowledgeSource — A pointer to a corpus that feeds RAG indices (file, URL, S3, database). See KnowledgeSource.

M

MCP (Model Context Protocol) — The protocol used by SDKs to expose tools, resources, and prompts to agents. See the MCP gateway and MCPServer.

Memory — A bound, durable scratchpad for an agent (working, semantic, episodic). See Memory.

Model — A model record describing a backend capability (provider, name, capabilities, limits, pricing). See Model.

ModelRoute — A capability-aware, cost-aware routing policy for selecting and falling back across providers. See ModelRoute.

O

OCSF — Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework. Joch trace events extend the OCSF event taxonomy. See OCSF Mapping.

OpenTelemetry — The CNCF observability standard. Joch trace events extend OTel semantic conventions. See OpenTelemetry Mapping.

P

Policy — A versioned, portable set of rules enforced by the policy engine before model, tool, memory, or network calls. See Policy.

R

RAG — Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Joch tracks RAG indices, the knowledge sources that feed them, and every retrieval as part of the trace. See RAG.

S

Secret — An external secret reference (Vault, Kubernetes secret, AWS Secrets Manager, env). Joch never stores secret values directly. See Secret.

SPDX — A Linux Foundation BOM standard supported by Joch's AgBOM emitter.

StateCheckpoint — A vendor-neutral snapshot of agent state used during provider migration. See StateCheckpoint.

SWID — A NIST software identification standard supported by Joch's AgBOM emitter.

T

Team / Namespace — A multi-tenant boundary in Joch. See Team / Namespace.

Tool — A single callable function exposed through the tool gateway. See Tool.

ToolCall — One concrete invocation of a tool, with side-effect classification, idempotency key, approval status, inputs, and outputs. See ToolCall.

Trace — The structured event log of an execution. See Trace and Events.

Trace (pillar) — One of the three AOS pillars: every agent decision is captured as an event in OpenTelemetry / OCSF format.