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Terminology

An overview of the novem terminology

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Overview

Novem is a fairly complicated platform and to make sure we're all talking about the same thing we've created a set of technical terms with explicit meaning.

This page provides a list and definition of the important technical terms and their definition.

Terminology

FQNP (Fully Qualified Novem Path)

The fully qualified novem path is how we refer to objects and entities within the novem platform. The FQNP gives a 100% unique string representation of all resources on the novem platform.

FQNPs are designed to be typeable, URL friendly, hierarchical and intuitive.

Novem resources are owned by either users or organisations, as such there are two root nodes in FQNP, either /u/ or /o/.

By convention all partial FQNPs should alternate between a general and a specific part with the general part listing the available options (conditioned on access). As such /u/ should list all users and /u/username/ should list all resources available for username.

Below we use the example of a plot variable as a fairly complex FQNP, but other visualisations, jobs and repos exhibit similar patterns.

For example, to reference a variable published on a novem plot you could reference it as follows:

/u/novem_demo
The novem user

Plot IDs are not globally unique, only usernames and organisations are. Therefore all FQNPs start with either /u/username or /o/orgid.



/u/ or /o/ on their own refers to all users or all orgs (that you can see).

/p/price_chart
The specific chart

Plot IDs are unique per user so this part selects a specific plot owned by this user. For mails, grids or docs use their respective 1-letter codes (/m, /g, /d). Jobs and repos live under the /code/ namespace as full words (/code/jobs/:job, /code/repos/:repo) rather than a single-letter code.



Similar to /u/ using just the /p/ will refer to all the user's accessible plots.

/v/close_price
The chart variable

The lowest level novem offers is individual data points on a vis/repo/job. These variables are individually set and globally accessible.



With no further information the default behavior is to color by a linear gradient interpolated between the two colors based on the underlying values in the filtered region.

Shortname

Every visualisation, repo, and job also gets a shortname: a compact, globally unique id (unlike an FQNP, it doesn't need the owner prefix). You'll find it at each resource's shortname path, and it's what the public share links and the /i alias below are keyed on.

Public read aliases

Alongside the /v1/... management tree, novem exposes a set of read-oriented aliases. They serve JSON and pre-rendered output directly, without the filesystem-style navigation, and honour the same access rules. Public resources work without a token. Everything else needs one with read access.

PathDescription
/v1/u/:userA user's public info, plus the visuals (vis) and the repos, jobs and spaces (code) you can see. See the profile response
/v1/u/:user/imgThe user's avatar — what embeds and link previews point at
/v1/u/:user/cardThe user's profile card
/v1/u/:user/bannerThe user's profile banner
/v1/u/:user/fThe user's activity feed
/v1/o/:orgThe organisation equivalent — card, banner, img and the org's visuals under p / g / m / d / v
/v1/i/:shortnameAny visualisation by its shortname — renders (img, pdf, pptx, csv, xlsx, txt, ansi, mhtml), assets and vars (v), without needing to know its type or owner
/v1/tYour tags, expanded
/v1/t/:tagA category tag's public listing — the discoverable =-prefixed categories

The profile response

/v1/u/:user returns the user's name, username, description, type, joined, avatar, social counts and your relationship to them. name and description are null unless the user has chosen to show them. The content you can see comes in two objects:

  • vis holds the visualisations, keyed by type: plots, grids, docs, mails and views. A type appears only when it has an entry you can see. Each list is also served on its own at the one-letter path (/v1/u/:user/p, /g, /m, /d, /v). When there is nothing to show, vis is an empty list, [], and not an object. That includes a user whose only content is code.
  • code holds the user's repos, jobs and spaces, the same collections as under /v1/users/:user/code/. All three keys are always present, and each is [] when empty.

Every entry carries id, shortname, name, summary, created, updated, social, shared and tags. Entries in vis also carry vis_type, type and uri.

The top-level repos field is a deprecated alias of code.repos, kept for existing clients. Read code.repos instead.

Reporting abuse

VerbPathDescription
POST/v1/abuseReport a user or piece of content for abuse
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