§2 Terminology and Requirement Levels

The key words MUST, MUST NOT, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT, and MAY are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 and RFC 8174.

• Asset — the source image file as acquired, byte-exact.
• Canonical Buffer — the full-resolution sRGB8 pixel buffer produced by CPNP-1 (§4).
• Render-affecting metadata — metadata that changes rendered appearance (EXIF Orientation, ICC profile, alpha semantics). Consumed during normalization, then discarded from the embedding path.
• Descriptive metadata — all other metadata (who, where, when, rights, captions). Preserved; never consumed by Layer 1.
• Embedding Space — a published, immutable descriptor of model + preprocessing + vector semantics under which vectors are comparable (§6).
• Record — one VER JSON document describing one Asset.
• Producer / Consumer — a system that emits / interprets Records.