Core concepts

Population

A Population is an identified governed collection. It selects a Contract and has a sequence of membership states. The Developer Preview works with known Population identities; it does not expose a general Population directory.

Generation

A Generation is one exact state of a Population’s membership. Retain the Generation identity returned by creation or publication. Do not substitute an ordinal, candidate identity or guessed hash.

Genotype

A Genotype is a schema-identified typed value with canonical identity. Storing a Genotype and including it in a Population Generation are separate operations.

Transaction

A Transaction publishes an explicit change. Membership publication supplies the complete desired membership and an exact expected parent; editing a draft does not alter persisted state. Canonical outcomes are committed, rejected, aborted, cancelled and indeterminate. A client timeout does not establish a sixth outcome or prove rollback.

Fork and lineage

A Fork is an explicit branch from a supported source context. Retained lineage describes actual derivation relationships. Similar values do not prove an edge, and missing history is not proof that no earlier relationship existed. Evolution Run lineage refers to an actual local evolution workflow, not merely the existence of a Fork.