Glossary
This page defines the common terms used throughout the DirtView schema documentation. It exists to reduce ambiguity and make sure product, design, engineering, and operations all use the same vocabulary.
1. Platform terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| DirtView | The overall software platform being built, including internal admin tools and tenant-facing applications. |
| Internal Admin Dashboard | The DirtView staff-only application used to manage tenants, feature flags, onboarding, support actions, and platform operations. |
| Tenant-facing App | The customer-facing application used by tenant users and project participants. |
| Module | A major functional area of the product, such as Drawings, Forms, RFIs, Documents, Photos, or Scheduling. |
| Feature Flag | A dynamic on/off switch used to control functionality globally or for specific tenants without redeploying code. |
2. Identity & access terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Tenant | A customer organization onboarded into DirtView. A tenant owns users, projects, files, drawings, and other business data. |
| Profile | The base authenticated person record at the platform level. A profile represents a user identity independent of tenant membership. |
| Tenant Membership | A user’s presence inside a specific tenant. It answers whether a person belongs to that tenant and in what status. |
| Employee | A business entity representing a worker or employee record inside a tenant. An employee may or may not have login access. |
| Super Admin | An internal DirtView staff account with platform-wide administrative power. Super admins are not tenant users. |
| Tenant Admin | A tenant-scoped customer user with elevated access inside their own tenant, typically responsible for managing users, projects, or configuration. |
| External Guest | A non-tenant or restricted outside collaborator who receives scoped access to selected tenant/project resources. |
| Role | A named bundle of permissions, such as Admin, Project Manager, Superintendent, Safety Manager, Foreman, or Viewer. |
| Permission | An atomic access capability, such as drawings.view, employees.manage, or projects.members.manage. |
| Company-level Role | The default role a tenant membership has across the tenant. |
| Project-level Role Override | A project-specific role assigned to a project member that overrides or refines company-level access. |
| Module-level Access | The finest-grained access layer, controlling whether a user can read or write inside a specific module on a project. |
| Ball-in-court | The current responsible party for a workflow item such as an RFI. |
3. Project terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Project | A tenant-owned construction project that acts as the main operational workspace for drawings, forms, RFIs, documents, and team collaboration. |
| Project Member | A tenant membership that has been added to a specific project. This determines project presence before project-specific roles or module access are applied. |
| Project Contact | A contact record associated with a project. A project contact may or may not be an actual DirtView user. |
| Distribution Group | A reusable group of recipients used for workflow routing, notifications, and communications. |
| Distribution Group Member | An internal user or external email recipient who belongs to a distribution group. |
| Enabled Modules | The list of product modules that are active for a project, such as Drawings, Forms, RFIs, Documents, or Photos. |
4. Drawings terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Drawing Set | A logical grouping of related drawings within a project, such as an architectural or structural set. |
| Drawing Version | A specific uploaded revision of a drawing set. A set may have many versions over time. |
| Current Version | The most recent or currently active version of a drawing set that users should treat as primary. |
| Sheet | A single drawing page within a drawing version, usually with its own sheet number and title. |
| Sheet Number | The canonical identifier of a sheet, such as A1.2 or S-201. |
| Sheet Name / Title | The descriptive name of the sheet, such as “Level 1 Floor Plan.” |
| Callout | A reference marker on a drawing that points to another sheet, detail, or section. |
| Callout Linking | The process of detecting a callout and resolving it to its target sheet or detail. |
| Annotation | A user-created markup on a drawing, such as pen strokes, shapes, text, clouds, or comments. |
| Measurement | A persisted or displayed distance/area/scale-based drawing markup used for construction reference. |
| Drawing Pin | A point placed on a drawing, often to link a workflow item such as an RFI to a specific location on a sheet. |
| OCR Review | The human verification step where OCR-detected sheet numbers and titles are confirmed or corrected. |
| Title Block | The region of a drawing sheet that typically contains sheet number, title, revision, and project metadata. |
5. Workflow terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Workflow Engine | The collection of modules and data structures that manage business processes such as RFIs, forms, notifications, approvals, and related events. |
| RFI | Request for Information. A formal request used to clarify design, construction, or field issues. |
| RFI Thread | A message, response, event, or note associated with an RFI over time. |
| Form Template | A reusable form definition containing schema, fields, and configuration for a particular business form. |
| Form Submission | A completed or draft instance of a form filled out from a template. |
| Template Snapshot | A stored copy of a template schema at the time of submission so historical submissions remain valid even if the template changes later. |
| Official Response | A designated authoritative reply in a workflow such as an RFI thread. |
| Status Transition | A change in lifecycle state, such as moving an RFI from Open to In Review or a submission from Draft to Submitted. |
| Routing | The process of sending a workflow item to the appropriate recipients, contacts, or parties. |
6. Notification terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Notification | A system-generated communication event sent through email, SMS, or in-app channels. |
| Notification Channel | The delivery medium for a notification, such as email, SMS, or in-app. |
| Notification Provider | The external service used to deliver notifications, such as Twilio or SendGrid. |
| Delivery Status | The current state of a notification attempt, such as queued, sent, delivered, or failed. |
| Default Distribution Group | A preconfigured recipient group associated with a template or workflow. |
7. Operations & security terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Audit Log | A historical record of important actions performed in the system. |
| Tenant Audit Log | The audit trail for user/business actions inside a tenant. |
| Admin Audit Log | The audit trail for super-admin platform actions outside tenant scope. |
| Immutable | A record that must never be changed or deleted after it is written. |
| Append-only | A pattern where new events create new rows and prior rows are preserved. |
| Soft Delete | A deletion pattern where a record is marked deleted using a timestamp instead of physically removed. |
| Token Revocation | The act of invalidating an otherwise still-valid token or session before natural expiry. |
| Impersonation | An internal support/debug action where an authorized admin temporarily acts as another user. |
| Background Job | An asynchronous processing task such as OCR, notification sending, PDF generation, or file scanning. |
| RLS (Row Level Security) | Database-level access control that restricts which rows a user/session can access. |
| Service Role | A backend-only privileged execution context used for internal or trusted operations that should never be exposed to clients. |
8. Data modeling terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Primary Key | The unique identifier for a row, usually a UUID in DirtView. |
| Foreign Key | A column that points to a related row in another table. |
| Polymorphic Association | A linking pattern where one table can point to different resource types using fields like resource_type and resource_id. |
| Metadata | Flexible supplemental data stored in a structured JSON field when not yet normalized into dedicated columns. |
| JSONB | A PostgreSQL data type used for structured JSON storage with query capability. |
| Schema Snapshot | A stored historical copy of a structure such as a form or workflow definition at a point in time. |
| Denormalized Field | A field that intentionally stores a duplicated display value, such as a user name in an audit record, to preserve history or simplify reads. |
| Current State Table | A table optimized for querying the latest/current state of a business object. |
| History Table | A table that stores historical events or changes over time, often append-only. |