An alphabetical list of terms with a short description. To help distinguish between the plain English meaning of these terms, and our more specific use, we Capitalize terms from this glossary when we refer to the LECO-specific meaning.
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Actor
An Actor offers a standardized interface to the LECO network to communicate with some Device. This happens via a Driver contained in the Actor, see {ref}components.md#actor. An Actor implements the mapping/translation between LECO messages and the Driver's interface.
Component
A type of entity, a set of which make up the LECO communication Network, see {ref}components.md#components.
Component name
The individual name in a Node, under which a Component can be addressed, see {ref}control_protocol.md#naming-scheme.
Coordinator
A Component primarily concerned with routing/coordinating the message flow between other Components, see {ref}components.md#coordinator.
There are Control Coordinators, Data Coordinators, and Logging Coordinators.
Device Some piece of hardware controlled by a Driver.
Director
A Component which takes part in orchestrating a (i.e. LECO-controlled) measurement setup, see {ref}components.md#director.
Directory
Each Coordinator maintains a local Directory with all the Components connected to it (i.e. other Coordinators and the Components of its own Node), and a global Directory with all Components in the whole Network, see {ref}control_protocol.md#directory.
Driver
An object that takes care of communicating with a Device. This object is external to LECO, for example coming from and instrument control library like pymeasure, instrumentkit or yaq. See {ref}components.md#driver.
Full name
The name of a Component unique for the whole setup.
It consists of the namespace and component-name, see {ref}control_protocol.md#naming-scheme.
LECO The Laboratory Experiment COntrol protocol framework.
Message
A LECO Message is one set of data transmitted from one Component to another, see {ref}messages.md#messages.
Messages are broadly divided into three categories or "channels": control, data, and logging messages.
Message Layer
The Message Layer is the communication layer that concerns itself with LECO message (de)composition, validation, serialisation, etc., see {ref}network-structure.md#message-layer.
:::{admonition} TODO
This is maybe gonna use Avro, but we still need to hash that out.
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Message Transport Mode (LMT/DMT)
The Node-local Message Layer can have a local or distributed mode, see {ref}network-structure.md#message-transport-mode-lmtdmt.
Namespace
The name of a Node in the Network, see {ref}control_protocol.md#naming-scheme.
Node
A Node is a local context in which (part of) a LECO deployment runs.
This may be a single application using one or more threads or processes.
A LECO network has one or more Nodes, see {ref}network-structure.md#node.
Network The web of Components communicating with each other in a LECO deployment.
Observer
A Component that receives data from other Components, e.g. for logging, storage, or plotting, see {ref}components.md#observer.
Processor
A Component on the LECO network which runs some kind of processing operation on one or more inputs and produces one or more outputs. Can be stateful or stateless. See {ref}components.md#processor.
Transport Layer
The Transport Layer is the communication layer that transports LECO messages between Components.
This uses zeromq or simpler localised methods, see Message Transport Mode above. See {ref}network-structure.md#transport-layer.
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