Plugin - a plugin is a containerized application that completes a specified set of procedures in an environment when called to execute.
Payload - a payload is a set of directives to a plugin to execute a job; it is a subset of a manifest and contains only information about attributes, input data sources and output data sources since it represents runtime needs not environment needs.
Job - a job is an atomic unit of analysis that optionally receives inputs and outputs (through a manifest ID that contains a payload) and is computed by a plugin in a compute environment.
Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) - a graph is a series of nodes (jobs) that will be distributed to a (set of) plugin(s). A DAG must have no cycles. A DAG is the connections of data that flows through an event.
Event - an event is a DAG with specific environment variables to define the event. for events with "memory" across multiple years, an event should represent multiple years (e.g. a lifecycle of 50 years as a single event).
Compute - A collection of events that is distributed through a compute provider