Decision Glossary

Precise language is infrastructure. These canonical EDAF™ terms keep architecture, governance, business and engineering discussions aligned.

Enterprise Decision Architecture

The fundamental concepts, structures, relationships, principles and governance by which an enterprise’s decisions transform information into outcomes.

Decision

A governed determination that resolves a defined question for a subject or case using applicable context and authority.

Decision object

The governed, versioned architectural description of a class of decisions.

Decision instance

One occurrence of a decision object for a defined subject, case, time and context.

Recommendation

A proposed response produced before final authority where the authority model requires separate authorisation.

Authorised decision

A determination that has satisfied the applicable authority and control conditions.

Decision record

Integrity-protected evidence sufficient to reconstruct and assess a decision instance.

DecisionOps

The operational discipline for releasing, observing, controlling, assuring and improving decision assets and performance.

Enterprise Decision Operating System

An enterprise capability system providing shared services and controls for the end-to-end lifecycle and operation of governed decisions.

Definitions shown here are from the EDAF™ normative-draft terminology dictionary, version 0.1.0-alpha.

Authority requires disciplined claims.

EDAF™ separates verified facts, framework definitions, reasonable inferences, assumptions, proposals and unknowns. Candidate measures remain labelled until their methods are validated.

Primary referencesOMG · Decision Model and Notation 1.5 ↗ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010:2022 · Architecture description ↗NIST · AI Risk Management Framework ↗EUR-Lex · Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 ↗