Glossary — Economics.

The vocabulary the platform is built on. The terms are load-bearing: the model is these words and how they connect. For the terms in context, see Core concepts.

The core objects

Activity — a process. Every production is one — factory or forest, industrial or natural. This is where environmental burden lives.
Flow — one edge into or out of an activity: a resource carried at a value, in a unit, with a direction (input or output), pointing at a sphere. Every flow is either intermediate (activity ↔ activity) or elementary (activity ↔ nature).
Resource — the what of a flow: the thing crossing an activity boundary. A validation label for matching a consumer's input to a producer's output — not where burden lives, and never the end of a chain.
Sphere — a physical layer of the Earth (geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and their sub-spheres), plus the Technosphere for product flows. Where flows terminate.
Organisation — who publishes an activity dataset (Economics., EXIOBASE, a company…).
Geography — where an activity happens; nested (a country inside a region inside global).
Unit — the measure a flow is expressed in (kg, kWh, litre, a currency…).

Flow types and terminals

Elementary flow — a resource drawn from or emitted to nature (a natural sphere). CO₂ to the troposphere; water from a river. Has no upstream — it is the boundary with nature.
Intermediate (product) flow — an activity's output consumed as another activity's input. Targets the Technosphere and is wired to its producing activity, so burden propagates backward.
Technosphere — the compartment that holds product flows; the everything-made-by- humans layer, as opposed to the natural spheres.

Kinds of resource

Every resource has a type: substance, mineral, energy, phenomenon, land, biological, socioeconomic, product, or financial. Each type anchors its identity to an external authority — a PubChem ID for substances, an IMA name for minerals, a GBIF taxon for organisms, a product code for goods.

Financial resource — money treated as a resource, on the same footing as carbon or water, denominated in a currency unit (ISO 4217). Money is the what; the currency is the unit.
Identity vs endpoint — a resource labels a flow (for validation and matching); it never ends a chain. The same identity (gold, water, CO₂) can be drawn from nature or produced by an activity — consumers join to whichever supplies them.

Chains and structure

Activity graph — the directed graph of activities linked by flows. Any activity may reference any other as an input or output.
Base activity — an activity whose inputs come only from spheres: the source end of a chain, drawing from nature.
Leaf activity — the mirror on the output side: an activity whose outputs go only to spheres, emitting to nature. An emergent property found by walking the graph, not a declared flag.
base → leaf — a complete path from a source terminal (drawing from nature) to a sink terminal (emitting to nature); an end-to-end chain through the technosphere.
Dual-sourcing — the same identity can be both natural and produced (water, CO₂, gold). Which one a given flow is depends on whether it links to a producing activity.

Accuracy

Accuracy — the honesty layer. Three components — source, geography, temporal — each 0 to 1, combined into a score and a letter grade (A–F) that propagates up the chain. See Accuracy & confidence.
Accuracy — source — how credible the originating dataset is.
Accuracy — geography — how well a flow's geography matches the activity consuming it (exact match → coarser region → global average).
Accuracy — temporal — how current the data is relative to the activity's year.

Principles

Everything is an activity — every production, factory or forest, is an activity; produced things must resolve to one, never stopping at a bare resource.
No cut-offs — missing data is shown as low accuracy, never as a silent zero or a blocked entry.
Money is a resource — money is a financial resource; currency is its unit.
Attribution, not authority — the platform doesn't assert facts; it records what a source says, scored and supersedable by better data for the same thing.