Glossary of terms

A specific kind of workflow used to confirm receipt and acceptance of a document — distinct from an approval workflow.

A list of users, roles, or departments and the permissions each holds on a specific resource (document, folder, workspace).

A non-destructive mark — highlight, sticky note, comment, drawing — added on top of a document without modifying its content.

A workflow action where a named individual or role decides to authorise (or refuse) further progression of a document or process.

An immutable, append-only log of every action taken on the system — the canonical record of who did what, when.

Periodically publishing the current state of an internal log to an external blockchain, making post-hoc tampering detectable without trusting the original logger.

Assigning a document to a known category (Invoice, Contract, Employee Record, etc.) — typically done by AI with a confidence score, sometimes confirmed by a human.

A curated collection of approved contract clauses — used to assemble new contracts and to compare against incoming third-party drafts.

A label indicating how sensitive a document is — Public, Internal, Confidential, or Restricted. Drives permission and sharing policies.

A tenant-defined metadata field attached to a document type — extending the standard Papyrus extraction schema.

Synonym for confidentiality level — the sensitivity label that determines how a document can be handled.

A formal request by an individual to receive all personal data an organisation holds about them, under Kenya's DPA or GDPR.

An organisational unit within a tenant — Finance, HR, Legal, Operations etc. — used to scope permissions and ownership.

A cryptographic signature using a private key tied to a verified identity — the strongest form of electronic signature.

An electronic form — a structured data-capture interface that produces a document on submission.

An electronic signature — typed, drawn, or uploaded — capturing intent to sign a document. Legally equivalent to wet signatures for most commercial contracts in Kenya.

Kenya's electronic Tax Invoice Management System — the KRA platform every VAT-registered organisation transmits invoices through.

Pulling structured fields (dates, amounts, parties, references) out of an unstructured document — usually via AI.

A cryptographic fingerprint of a file — a fixed-length string that changes if any byte of the file changes.

A named container in the document hierarchy. A document has exactly one folder; folders can nest.

Search that matches the literal words in your query against the words in the documents — the classic keyword-based search.

A sequence of audit log entries in which each entry includes the cryptographic hash of the previous entry — making post-hoc tampering detectable.

A network of entities (people, organisations, projects, etc.) and their relationships, extracted from a document corpus.

A legal flag preventing the deletion of named documents, folders, or users' content regardless of retention policy.

Data *about* a document — its category, dates, parties, value, classification, owner — distinct from the document content itself.

A commitment extracted from a contract — payment milestones, renewal dates, deliverable dates, notice periods — with associated deadlines.

Optical Character Recognition — converting an image of text (a scan, a photo) into machine-readable text.

A specific right granted to a user or role — View, Edit, Share, Delete, Approve — on a specific resource.

Personally Identifiable Information — data that can be used to identify a specific individual, alone or in combination.

An AI pattern where a language model answers questions by first retrieving relevant documents, then synthesising from them — used by the Papyrus Copilot.

The discipline of keeping documents for the period required by law or business, then disposing of them deliberately.

Permanently obscuring sensitive content in a document — black bars, blurs, or removed sections — for safe sharing.

A rule specifying how long a class of document is kept, what triggers the retention clock, and what happens at expiry.

A condition that determines which workflow or approver a document goes to, based on its classification, metadata, or origin.

Search by meaning rather than literal words — finds documents that talk about a concept even if they don't use the exact terms.

Service Level Agreement — a target time by which a workflow step must complete, measured against actual performance.

Applying a visible mark — date received, paid, approved, certified — onto a document's rendered output.

A flexible label applied to a document — a document can have many tags, unlike a folder which it has exactly one of.

An isolated Papyrus instance for one organisation — with its own users, documents, settings, billing, and data residency.

A point-in-time snapshot of a document's content. Every edit creates a new version; older versions remain accessible.

A faint overlay — typically the viewer's email and IP, or 'DRAFT', 'CONFIDENTIAL' — printed across a document for traceability and discouragement of leaks.

A defined sequence of actions — typically approvals, notifications, conditionals — that a document or process moves through.