Construction has its own vocabulary, and Demiton adds a small one of its own. This page defines both in plain language, with a link to the page that explains each one in full.
The one continuous, sourced record of a civil job that every register, connector and surface feeds or reads from - from the public market through the award into your delivery. Demiton is built on it, but it isn’t a thing you buy on its own. See How your registers become one record.
Register
One kind of record, kept current in one agreed format, however many systems produced it - site diaries, timesheets, budget lines. It is the same idea as the plant register or drawing register you already keep. See What a register is.
Register contract
The published JSON Schema behind a register: the fields a record carries, which are required, their units, and an example. Every published contract is listed in the register contract reference, which carries the live count.
Ingest group
The pipe that writes records into a register - a connector, a harvester, or a computed reconciliation. It carries the routing, entitlement and provenance for everything it writes. See Ingest groups.
Shelf
The earlier name for a register. See Register, above, and Registers.
Provenance
Where a record came from: which system, which connector, and which run wrote it. Provenance is stamped on every record, so an answer can always be traced back to its source. See Ingest groups.
Entity
The canonical thing a record is about - a worker, a project, an asset, an organisation. Records attach to entities rather than to system-specific IDs, so memory survives a system migration. See Memory.
The Open Contracting Data Standard: the open schema Australian governments publish planning notices, tenders and awards under. It shapes the pre-award half of Civil Memory. See OCDS.
OCID
The Open Contracting Identifier: the globally unique ID an OCDS release gives one contracting process. It is how Demiton follows a single job from planning notice through tender to award without confusing it with a similarly named package.
OC4IDS
The Open Contracting for Infrastructure Data Standard: the delivery record for work you have won and are delivering. It is produced only through a contractor-initiated, consented, audited emission - never by default. See OC4IDS.
Award seam
The point where a public tender becomes your private delivery project. Public market data (OCDS) hands off to your operational record when a pursuit is linked to the contract that was won.
Per-project P&L
Profit and loss for one job: budget, actual cost, commitments, contract value and gross margin, drawn from your ERP and refreshed nightly. The register is profit_and_loss. See Registers.
SoR / schedule of rates
A client’s priced list of work items - the rates a contract is measured and paid against. In Demiton, a schedule of rates can be checked against tender drawings by independent measurement; see sor_verification in the register catalog.
A client’s or road authority’s process for deciding in advance which contractors may bid for which work and at what value. It is the eligibility lens that sits before the market, and the standing it declares is what Protection’s lapsed compliance disease watches. The stand-alone Prequalification surface was retired in September 2026.
NPS
The Austroads National Prequalification System, used across Australian road authorities to classify contractors. Your NPS standing is recorded as classifications and expiry dates against your schemes.
R / B / F / A
The four NPS classification families: R for road construction, B for bridge, F for financial capacity, and A for asphalt. Levels sit inside each family - R1 to R5, B1 to B4, and A1 to A4 - while the financial level is stated as a value such as F25.
Retention
Money a client withholds from progress payments as security for defects, released under the contract. The retention_position register holds what is currently withheld on a job. See the register catalog.
Security of payment
The legislation that gives a contractor a right to a payment schedule and adjudication when a claim is not paid on time. The payment_schedule register is defined for it; see the register catalog.
One duty a published document places on you for a job, with its clause, its window and what happens if you miss it. Section 76 of Queensland’s BIF Act, a payment schedule within 15 business days of a claim, is one. See Obligations.
Source
One of the seven places a job’s duties come from: contract, law, principal, approvals, counterparties, workforce, and your own commitments. A standard such as AS or ISO is not a source; it enters through the contract or principal that calls it up. See Obligations.
Instrument
One published document inside a source: an Act, a regulation, a contract form, a principal’s specification, a permit. The Building Industry Fairness (Security of Payment) Act 2017 (Qld) is one instrument.
Obligation library
The public set of instruments and their obligations that Demiton reads, one file per instrument, each obligation cited to its clause. It lives in the demitonapp/registers repository, and anyone can propose an addition. It is not complete, and Demiton never says it is.
Protection
One obligation switched on for one of your jobs. It runs every day from the day it is switched on.
Protection type
How a protection runs, one of four: watch (a window opens when something happens and its deadline is tracked), countdown (a fixed date, flagged at 90, 30 and 7 days), check (evidence that must exist is looked for on a cadence), threshold (a measure is tracked against the line it must not cross).
Disease
Which of the five a protection guards against: rework, missed claims, disputes, cost drift or lapsed compliance. It is set on the obligation, separately from the protection type. See The five diseases.
Ready state
Whether a protection can run today. When it cannot, the register it reads is empty, and it names the kind of system that would fill it (“your finance system”) before any vendor.
The Model Context Protocol: the open protocol that lets Claude, ChatGPT or an IDE call Demiton’s tools. A connection lists four tools - ask_demiton, tell_demiton, instruct_demiton and switch_org. See MCP tools.
Simulation mode
A dry run for any write. The workflow evaluates and logs exactly what it would write, and to which system, without changing anything. See Security and governance.
Register status: Available
The register is filled today from connected systems, uploads, or Demiton’s own public data.
Register status: Declared
The register and its contract exist, and it fills as soon as a source or feature produces its first record. A Declared register can legitimately be empty.
Register status: Planned
The register is defined as a contract, ahead of the connector that will fill it.
Still unsure what a term means, or want it defined for your own systems?
Ask us.
Talk to the team
Tell us what you run - your ERP, field, payroll and document systems - and we will show you the registers Demiton would fill from them, on your data, in a 30-minute call.