Glossary
The words, used precisely.
Several of these are used loosely in everyday conversation in exactly the way that causes the problem — ownership meaning repository access, custody meaning title. Here is what each one means here.
- Intangible asset
- A non-physical asset a business owns or controls: a brand, a trademark, copyright in software or content, a domain, know-how, a dataset, a trained model, a licence. Not all of them appear on a balance sheet, and the ones that do not are usually the ones with no clear record.
- Ownership graph
- The connected record of entities, brands, assets, agreements, people and rights, where each connection is a typed relationship rather than a note. It is what makes an ownership question answerable by traversal instead of by interview.
- Chain of title
- The sequence of events and documents by which a right travelled from whoever created it to whoever holds it now. For software this typically runs contributor → agreement → contribution → asset → owner. A folder of files is not a chain of title; a path with evidence at each material step is.
- Provenance
- Evidence of where something came from and who produced it. Commit history, release records and contribution summaries are provenance. Provenance supports an ownership conclusion; on its own it is not one.
- Legal ownership
- Which entity holds the right in law, and which evidence supports that. Distinct from who administers the account the asset lives in.
- Operational custody
- Who actually controls an asset day to day — the registrar account, the repository organization, the cloud administrator. Custody is frequently held by a different party than the legal owner, and a mismatch is one of the most common findings in a first audit.
- Economic grouping
- Which brand, product or business package an asset economically belongs to. Grouping describes composition. It never changes who legally owns a member.
- Brand Asset Package
- A virtual package containing the assets, rights, software, domains, accounts and agreements that together make up a brand or business. The unit a transaction scenario, a diligence room and an IBOM are scoped to. It does not own anything itself.
- Assertion
- A claim about the world — that this entity owns that asset — recorded with its source evidence, a verification status and a reviewer. The current state is what the verified assertions resolve to, which is why a disputed claim can exist without corrupting the record.
- Evidence
- The source material supporting an assertion: an executed assignment, a board resolution, a registry certificate, a contribution record. Stored with versions and content hashes so an export can be checked against what the platform holds.
- Assignment
- A transfer of ownership of an intangible asset from one party to another, usually in writing. The document most often missing when a contractor's contributions turn out to be uncovered.
- Licence grant
- Permission to use an asset without owning it, bounded by territory, field of use, term, exclusivity and whether it can be sublicensed or transferred. In a group, the mechanism by which shared software stays with the parent while a sold brand keeps using it.
- Novation
- Replacing one party to a contract with another, with the counterparty's agreement. Distinct from assignment: a novation needs the other side to sign, which is why it appears on transfer plans as a dependency rather than a task.
- Change-of-control clause
- A contract term triggered when ownership of a party changes — often giving the counterparty a right to consent, renegotiate or terminate. Ordinary until the moment it is decisive, which is why it belongs in the record before a transaction starts.
- Contributor coverage
- Whether every person who contributed to an asset was, during the period they contributed, covered by an agreement assigning the results to the company. Measured as a window, not as the existence of a document.
- SBOM
- Software Bill of Materials: a list of the third-party components in a piece of software, usually in SPDX or CycloneDX format. It proves what is present. It says nothing about who owns the proprietary code around those components.
- IBOM
- Intangible Bill of Materials: the same idea applied to a brand or business package — a structured manifest of the assets, ownership references, rights and dependencies that compose it, exportable for a counterparty to read.
- Readiness
- A measure of completeness and exceptions against configured rules: assets without a verified owner, uncovered contributors, custody mismatches, expiring rights. A completeness signal, never a legal opinion or a certification that a position is sound.
- Transaction scenario
- A modelled future state — a sale, spin-out or reorganization — built on a snapshot of the graph. Scenarios never mutate the live record, so several can be compared before anything is committed.
- Effective date
- When a relationship became true in the world, as opposed to when it was typed into a system. The distinction is what makes point-in-time questions answerable.
- Supersession
- Replacing an assertion with a newer one while keeping the old one queryable. The alternative — overwriting — destroys the history that explains how the current position arose.
- Confidentiality label
- A classification on an object or document that constrains who can see it, and which applies to graph traversal, search, export and AI retrieval — not only to which page a person can open.
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