PanSphaira terminology and identity guardrails

This document is the current naming contract for the PanSphaira public product spelling. It defines display and architecture vocabulary; it does not change the product's security model, runtime behavior, wire contracts, schemas, or stable technical identities.

Terminology contract

• PanSphaira is the official product name in current human-facing material.
• pansphaira is a technical slug only when a genuinely new branded slug is needed. Its availability does not authorize migration of an existing identifier.
• Sphere is architecture and visualization vocabulary only. It is not a protocol, schema, API, service, runtime abstraction, or technical namespace.
• Agent Sphere is the Agent or untrusted-runtime side of a governed boundary.
• Gateway Sphere is the mediated-capability side of that boundary.
• A Connection is a permitted information or action link.
• A Crossing is governed traversal across a boundary. It describes an architectural event, not a wire contract, message format, endpoint, schema, API, header, or protocol.
• PSAI is an informal nickname only. It must not be used as a package, schema, environment-variable, header, protocol, service, or other technical prefix.

The following established architecture terms retain their existing meanings: Agent, Untrusted Runtime, Runtime Isolation Boundary, Gateway, Broker, Policy, Approval, Capability, Authority, Readback, Receipt, Evidence, Owner, Adapter, and Provider Binding. Sphere wording may make their relationships easier to visualize; it does not replace or redefine them.

Decision contract

Every naming occurrence must be classified before it is edited:

Classification	Required treatment
CHANGE NOW	Update active, human-facing product branding and approved display or visualization labels.
KEEP	Preserve stable technical identities, historical material, and any ambiguous identifier. This is the default.
MIGRATE CAREFULLY	Change only as a complete, separately reviewed dependency cluster with all producers, consumers, compatibility boundaries, cleanup, rollback, assertions, and derived-data refresh identified.
DECISION REQUIRED	Keep unchanged until an explicit decision exists; do not infer one from the product rename.

Display terminology never by itself changes runtime meaning or authorizes a machine-identity migration.

Stable technical identities: default KEEP

Existing machine-consumed identities remain unchanged unless a later, versioned exception is explicitly approved. The KEEP boundary includes, but is not limited to:

• chimpmaera.*, chimpmaera://, and io.chimpmaera.* identities;
• cm.*, CM_*, CM-*, cm_*, cm-*, and x-cm-* identifiers;
• package names, image tags, service and volume names, state paths, plugin IDs, Docker labels, environment variables, headers, and URI schemes;
• schema $id values and schemaVersion constants;
• claim, denial, receipt, evidence, policy, capability, and fixture IDs;
• negative-test sentinels, golden fixtures, and compatibility values.

Cosmetic similarity to the previous product name is not evidence that an identifier is safe to change. A proposed exception must enumerate every definition, producer, consumer, persisted value, compatibility boundary, test, migration step, cleanup step, and rollback action. Partial sweeps and unversioned aliases are not approved.

Historical boundary: KEEP

History remains an accurate record of the name and state that existed when it was created. Do not rewrite or regenerate historical tags, releases, issues, pull requests, commits, snapshots, archives, changelogs, published artifacts, proofs, manifests, checksums, or evidence solely to apply current branding. Preserving history also prohibits history rewrites and force-pushes for this cutover.

Stable-ID exception register

There are no approved stable-ID exceptions at publication of this contract. The register is intentionally empty, so the default for every existing or ambiguous machine identifier is KEEP.

Any future entry must be separately approved, versioned, consumer-complete, reversible, and linked to its migration and verification evidence. Adding PanSphaira or Sphere display vocabulary to a current surface is not such an exception.

PAN-08 reviewed verdicts (2026-08-17)

The mandatory review found no proposed stable-ID exception to approve. These verdicts are the exact handoff for PAN-07 assertions and PAN-09 integration:

Verdict	Reviewed class	Evidence	Decision
PAN-08-V1	PAN-05 demo display branding	The PAN-05 diff contains 42 ChimpMaera to PANSPHAIRA word substitutions under demo/**. Its 445-entry unique machine-token inventory is identical before and after the change (SHA-256 11b530a796db284b30de99ccb1fe90b9ae82815b9f193ea068e9e3421221fac5).	CHANGE NOW display text; no stable-ID exception.
PAN-08-V2	PAN-05 operational, contract, security, and fixture identities	Definition/consumer comparison retains the existing service, image, volume, state-path, label, plugin, tool, environment-variable, chimpmaera.*, cm.*, CM_*, schema/version, policy, denial, claim, receipt, and fixture identities.	KEEP; no migration approved.
PAN-08-V3	PR-220 governed video identities	tools/video-production-reference/**, docs/EXTERNAL-VIDEO-SERVICE.md, and docs/capabilities.md are byte-identical between protected baseline 729fd69d414989e6ce20da0212f36131a3c2d581 and reviewed integration head 698e11eb51d9bae4d5d19080842521f91dc61dd1. The 45-entry unique technical-token inventory is identical (SHA-256 403c8ef84efb7c1f90cce10c0a74880dd64098d125f2aa66c7e0680f249a65f5), including cm.video/v1, chimpmaera.video/*, the package-index MIME type, component IDs, cm-video paths, and CM_VIDEO_* variables.	KEEP; the technical video subsystem is unchanged.
PAN-08-V4	New technical-prefix collision check	Scoped scans of PAN-05 demo and PR-220 video surfaces find zero lowercase pansphaira or PSAI/psai technical tokens.	KEEP the empty exception register; do not introduce a PANSPHAIRA or PSAI namespace.

The inventories above are sorted unique matches for established chimpmaera/cm/CM machine-token forms; the video inventory additionally includes its application/vnd.chimpmaera...+json form. They are review evidence, not a new schema, protocol, generated artifact, or runtime contract.