Glossary
Proof infrastructure, defined.
The terms behind Noesea's claims, evidence, verification and dispute settlement, in plain language.
Claims
- Canonical claim
- A claim reduced to one deterministic form: text is Unicode-normalized, entities and related claims are sorted, and fields are encoded identically on every platform, so equivalent input always produces the same bytes. Proof infrastructure protocol
- Claim ID
- The claim's stable identifier: keccak256 over the ABI encoding of the canonicalization version, topic ID, content hash and nonce. Independent clients derive the same ID for the same canonical claim. Protocol SDK
- Topic ID
- A 32-byte identifier that binds a claim to a subject area. It is part of the claim ID and scopes reputation, so expertise earned in one topic does not carry into another.
- Claim type
- The resolution profile of a claim — for example empirical, interpretive, predictive or provenance integrity. It determines which dispute rules and bonds apply.
- Golden test vectors
- A shared corpus of inputs and expected outputs that every canonicalizer implementation must reproduce exactly. They keep claim IDs identical across Rust, TypeScript, the web verifier and the contracts.
Evidence
- Content hash
- A cryptographic fingerprint of a file. If a single byte changes, the hash changes, so anyone holding the file can confirm it is the one that was recorded. Evidence anchoring guide
- Evidence record
- The protocol's description of one piece of evidence: content hash, media type, a URI or encrypted pointer, a Merkle root when bundled, attribution, and references to custody and provenance events. The file itself is not stored on-chain.
- Merkle root
- A single hash that commits to every item in a bundle. Anchoring the root commits to all of the items at once.
- Merkle inclusion proof
- A short list of hashes showing that one item belongs to an anchored bundle, without revealing the other items in it.
- Custody event
- A signed record of a handoff — capture, transfer or review — that shows who held an artifact and in what order. Legal evidence guide
- Provenance
- Verifiable information about where an artifact came from and how it changed. Noesea prioritizes provenance over forensic detection, whose reliability shifts as generation techniques change. Media authenticity
- Anchoring
- Recording a hash or Merkle root on-chain with a timestamp and custody event, so the commitment can later be checked against public chain state.
- Retrievability
- Whether the bytes behind a hash can still be fetched. It is tracked separately from integrity through storage-provider receipts and re-download probes, because a hash cannot reconstruct missing data.
- Encrypted pointer
- How confidential evidence is referenced: the storage location is encrypted rather than published, so only authorized recipients can retrieve the file.
Verification
- Receiver-side verification
- Checking a record on the receiving end — recomputing hashes, checking inclusion proofs and validating signatures — without trusting the sender or Noesea-operated infrastructure. Verify a proof
- Verifiability tier
- A grade from 0 to 5 describing what a third party can independently check about a record: unverified, hash-verifiable, anchored, evidence-graph verifiable, dispute-settled, or fully protocol-verifiable. A tier is never a verdict on its own. Tier table
- Signed response
- A machine-consumable result carrying a claim's status, proofs and evidence references, signed with an EIP-712 signature so a consumer can check who produced it and that it was not altered. Integration guide
Disputes and governance
- Challenge
- A stake-backed position that a claim or its evidence does not hold up. Opening one locks the challenger's stake and starts the dispute process. Dispute settlement guide
- Juror snapshot and draw
- When a jury is requested, the eligible juror set is frozen and a future draw block is pinned; jurors are then drawn from that snapshot, optionally mixing in a drand randomness beacon, so nobody can choose the randomness after seeing the pool.
- Commit-reveal voting
- Jurors first submit a hash of their vote with a secret salt, then reveal the vote. Votes stay hidden until the reveal phase, which reduces herding. The commitment binds the vote to the claim ID and the juror's address.
- Appeal
- A request to re-hear a finalized dispute. An appeal draws a new, larger panel only from jurors who have not served in an earlier round of the same dispute.
- Inconclusive outcome
- A tie or below-quorum round. It produces a settlement record but not a decisive verdict.
- Slashing
- Loss of staked tokens under the committed settlement rules. A governance-bounded share of the losing stake goes to the winning side and jurors; the remainder is burned. Jurors are not slashed for voting with the minority.
- Reputation (REP)
- Topic-scoped, non-transferable, capped and decaying protocol state earned through participation. It counts only for accounts with a valid human-identity binding.
- Human-assurance tier
- The level of identity assurance a provider attests for an account, from H2 Basic to H5 Maximum Assurance. H3 is the minimum tier used for juror eligibility. Identity assurance tiers
- Governance limits
- What governance cannot do: decree outcomes, mint NOESEA, transfer reputation, redirect slashed tokens or lower hard safety floors. It can adjust bounded parameters. Governance