Glossary

Every term in one or two sentences, in the order the model lists them. The pages link here on the first use of a term.

Clowder: A group of cats living at one place, with an address and a responsible person. Foster homes and adopters' homes are both Clowders. In Pet Mode the word on screen is Household; the thing is the same. Not called: litter, home, placement, group.
Cat: An individual animal being tracked, with a name, images, and field values that change over time.
Litter: Kittens born to the same mother in one birth. Not stored — derived: same Mother and same birth date. Never a housing group.
Mother / Father: Starter Fields of type cat-reference linking a Cat to its parents. Family relations — littermates, siblings, kittens — are derived from Mother plus birth date; Father is display and navigation only.
Stray: A Cat currently in no Clowder; tracked by map positions instead. A state, not a kind — any Cat becomes a Stray by leaving its Clowder (running away, Clowder deleted) and stops being one on a Move into a Clowder.
Catalog: Everything one body of work holds: its Cats, Clowders, Fields, photos, sync partners and map position. A device can hold several, and nothing is shared between them — two cities stay apart. The app's own settings (author name, language, tips already seen) are shared by all of them. One Catalog is open at a time; its name is the title of the home screen. Not called: database, profile, workspace, account.
Moment: A point a Catalog can be returned to, recorded before anything that changes a lot at once — an import, a sync, a Merge, an Archive — or marked by hand with a name. It is a mark in the log, not a copy. Going back to one removes everything written after it, having written that to a file first. Not called: snapshot, save point, restore point, checkpoint.
Crop: Cutting one cat out of a photo. Happens in the import flow (skippable; Stray Cam photos skip it, frames kept from a video get it one by one, cut from the full-size frame) or later from the photo menu; cropping later adds the cropped copy as a new photo, the original stays.
Mark: A highlight (ellipse/arrow) baked into a copy of a photo to point at one cat when cropping cannot isolate it — an ordinary new photo, synced and printed like any other.
Flier: A missing-cat poster captured into the catalog. Capturing one creates a Missing Cat plus its owner's Clowder, and the place it was photographed becomes a Flier Position on that cat. Not called: poster, notice, report.
Missing Cat: A Stray known only from a Flier — no sighting yet. Its history records leaving the owner's Clowder on the missing-since date; it stops being missing the ordinary way, by a Move or a Merge with a sighted cat. Not called: lost cat record, flier cat.
Flier Position: The place a Flier was photographed — where the poster hangs, not where the cat was seen. Never shown as a sighting pin; it only anchors the Possible Stray Area.
Flier Template: How one registry lays out its posters — which printed labels stand for which Field, how the name line reads, which lines are the registry's own contact. Shipped as data (assets/fliers/templates.json); the best-matching Template reads a Flier, an unmatched layout leaves every line for the user to assign. Not called: parser, OCR rules, hardcoded TASSO.
Appointment: A visit with a date, optional time, what, and notes on one Cat or Clowder; finishing it can write a value into a Field. Stored as an ordinary entry, so it syncs and merges like any value. Not called: event, booking.
Vet Run: One Appointment shared by several Cats — each Cat keeps its own Appointment entry, a group id folds them into one agenda card and one calendar event, editing moves all of them, finishing asks which Cats were treated. A Cat leaves a Vet Run by deleting its own Appointment. Not called: group appointment, batch visit, multi-cat event.
Pet Mode: A Catalog's choice to hold pets rather than cats (#93): an ordinary synced entry, so every device shows it the same way. It changes words (pet, household), the placeholder picture (a paw) and the proposed names — never the data. Older versions ignore it. Not called: neutral mode, animal mode.
Unit Value: A Field value that measures something — a number kept in the app's base unit (grams, centimetres, millilitres, °C) and shown, and entered, in the unit the device prefers (metric or imperial, from the region or chosen). Weight is the starter one. Not called: measurement, metric.
Dimension: What a Unit Value measures: weight, length, volume or temperature. Chosen when the Field is created; it fixes the base unit.
Possible Stray Area: A toggleable map overlay for a Missing Cat: the union of 500 m circles around its Flier Positions, marking where the cat is likely to roam (three quarters of lost cats are found within 500 m). Not called: search radius, home range.
Stray Cam: One-tap capture of a new Stray: creates the Cat at the device's current position with a photo (system camera or picked from the device), no further input required.
Merge: Combining two records of the same real thing — Cat, Clowder, or Field. The user picks the survivor; the survivor's current values win — except where the cat lives, which the latest move of either record decides by its own date — the other record's history joins the survivor's timeline, the other record ceases to exist. Irreversible.
Card: The presentation of one Cat — as a detail screen in the app, and as a shareable/printable export (image or PDF) with photo and current field values.
Profile Image: The one image of a Cat shown in lists and on its Card; choosable, defaults to the first image.
Field: A typed, user-defined attribute (text, yes/no, date, number, choice, location, ID) attachable to Cats and Clowders. Definitions are global to the catalog; values carry a date and an Author, and every change is kept as history. Not called: property, column, tag.
ID Field: A Field type holding an external identifier, entered by hand or camera scan and shown on the Card in a display format picked at field creation (plain, QR, or barcode). ID values match other records exactly or not at all — never fuzzily. Not called: code, reference number.
Chip ID: A starter ID Field on Cats for the 15-digit transponder number. The prime exact-match key between a Missing Cat and a found cat. Not called: microchip number, transponder.
Remarks: A starter multiline text Field on Cats and Clowders for free notes — including text read off a Flier. Not called: notes, comments, description.
Move: A change of a Cat's Clowder membership, recorded as a dated field change like any other. A Cat's movement history is the history of this field. Always within one Catalog.
Transfer: Taking a Cat, or a Clowder with the Cats living in it, out of one Catalog and into another. Not a Move — it crosses Catalogs and re-stamps the entries under the destination's device, so the two Catalogs can never re-merge through a shared sync partner. The interface says "move to another catalog", because that is what a keeper sees; the model calls it a Transfer.
Adoption: A Move into a Clowder whose Status is forever home. Not a stored status on the Cat — there is no "adopted" flag. Not called: adopted state, adoption record.
Author: The self-chosen name a device carries; every change is attributed to an Author. There are no accounts and no authentication.
Status: A Clowder Field with suggested canonical values (foster, forever home, clinic/vet, shelter, barn, owner) the app recognizes for display and behavior (e.g. Adoption). Free text beyond the suggestions is allowed and stays an ordinary value. Not called: clowder type, category.
Private: A checkmark on one value, set in the field editor: that value stays in the local catalog unless a share sends it with the "Share private data" switch — the switch always means sending the private values, in every transport. Privacy is about doxing, not about hiding that a cat or a clowder exists: entity id, kind, name and Clowder membership always travel, so nothing a partner receives ever points at something they have never heard of. A withheld value leaves a $withheld:<field> trace behind (rendered as a lock on an empty row), and the value itself arrives later if a private-included share ever carries it. There is no entity-level Private on Cats or Clowders; marking a Field definition Private marks that field on every entity. No popups explain any of this — the lock and the switch are the whole UI. Trust is decided per handshake by the human, not by the system. Not called: hidden (that's display-only), secret.
Hidden: A per-device display filter on an entity or Field definition. Hidden things are received, stored, and synced onward unchanged — they are only not shown. A "show hidden" toggle reveals them. Never leaves the device. Not called: blocked, private (that's wire-level).
Deceased: A Cat whose deceased date Field is set. Rendered subdued (dimmed photo, localized "Deceased" chip — no religious symbols) and listed in the import summary.
Species: A starter Field on Cats, default "cat": a choice with presets (cat, dog, rabbit, guinea pig, hamster, bird, horse, tortoise, ferret) plus a word of your own. Stored canonical, displayed translated (ADR-0005). Breed options follow the species; the entity stays a Cat in the data whatever the species. The wording the app uses for it is decided by Pet Mode, not by the species.
Ban: A local, per-device list of Authors/devices and blob hashes whose material is dropped on receive (received and discarded — sync bookkeeping still advances). Never propagates to other devices. Reversible per entry. Not called: block (import filter sense), report.
Hard Delete: Physical removal of all entries and blobs of one Author/device from the local store — the sole exception to append-only history, for malicious or illegal content. Usually paired with a Ban so the material cannot return.