Glossary

Population intelligence, in plain English.

The terms that come up when institutions try to understand people at scale, defined in a sentence or two.

Terms

Twenty-four terms, defined.

Population intelligence

Connecting signals from media, social platforms, policy and citizen contact around the people they describe, to see who is responding, where, why and what is changing.

Cohort

A group of people who share a characteristic that matters to the question, such as age, region or service use.

Sentiment

Whether what people say about an issue is broadly positive, negative or neutral.

Stance

The position someone takes on a specific proposal: for, against or undecided. Different from sentiment: an angry supporter has negative sentiment and a supportive stance.

Salience

How much an issue matters to people right now, relative to other issues.

Narrative

A recurring story or framing that people use to explain an issue.

Signal

Any single piece of information about what people think or do: a news report, a post, a complaint, a survey answer.

Provenance

Where a piece of evidence came from and what has happened to it since.

Evidence lineage

The chain from a conclusion back to the sources and steps that produced it.

Confidence

How strongly a result should be relied on, given the evidence behind it.

Early warning

Detecting a shift before it becomes widely visible.

Anomaly

A change that breaks the usual pattern and may deserve attention.

Media monitoring

Tracking what broadcast, print and online news report.

Social listening

Tracking what people say on social platforms and in digital conversation.

Policy monitoring

Tracking legislation, announcements and institutional activity.

Citizen engagement

Collecting what people report directly, through complaints, correspondence and consultations.

Public consultation

A formal process in which a public body asks for views before deciding.

Speech recognition (ASR)

Software that turns spoken audio into text.

Optical character recognition (OCR)

Software that turns text in images or scanned documents into machine-readable text.

Large language model (LLM)

An AI model trained on large amounts of text that can summarise, classify and answer questions about language.

Agentic AI

AI that carries out a bounded task over several steps, such as monitoring a topic and preparing a brief.

Sovereign AI

AI deployed so that data, models and control stay within the jurisdiction and authority of the institution using it.

Data residency

Keeping data stored and processed in a specified country or region.

Human in the loop

A design in which a person reviews or approves an AI-assisted result before it is acted on.

Orbiter

A population intelligence platform from Desider Holdings.

Orbiter is a population intelligence platform from Desider Holdings.

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