Reference
Glossary
Glattice uses a handful of words in a specific sense. This is what each of them means, in the order you meet them. If you know kanban, the short version is: a lattice is a board, a facet is a field you can put on an axis, and a card is a card.
Lattice
- A board. The word is literal: cards sit on a grid formed by two facets, one driving the rows and one driving the columns. If you know Trello or Jira, a lattice is what you would call a board, with a second axis.
Facet
- A way of classifying cards — Status, Priority, Owner, Quarter. A facet is roughly what other tools call a field, a property or a label set, with one difference: any facet can be put on an axis, used as a card colour, an icon, a dot or a pill, and moved between those roles without touching a single card.
Facet value
- One option inside a facet. "In Progress" is a value of the Status facet; "P1" is a value of Priority. Values carry their own colour and icon, which is what makes a board readable at a glance.
Card
- One item of work or content: a task, a candidate, an article, a game. A card holds a title, a description, images, comments and a value for each facet it is assigned to. Its position on the grid is not stored separately — it IS its facet values.
Cell
- The intersection of one row value and one column value. Dropping a card into a cell assigns both values at once, which is why a single drag does what two dropdowns would do elsewhere.
Space
- The tenant boundary — what other tools call a workspace or an organisation. Every board, facet and card belongs to exactly one space, billing is per space, and the database enforces the boundary rather than the application code.
Pattern
- A reusable facet. Promote a facet to a pattern and you can attach it to as many boards as you like and edit it in one place; every board using it updates. Personal patterns are a Pro feature, shared team patterns a Team one.
Pivot
- Changing which facet drives the rows and which drives the columns. Cards keep their facet assignments; only the layout changes, so the same work answers another question. This is the central Glattice interaction.
Spine
- The coloured edge on a card, driven by whichever facet you have chosen as the colour facet. It lets a card carry a third dimension of meaning without occupying an axis.
Date facet
- A facet whose values are dates rather than options. Put one on an axis and that axis becomes a timeline, with cards rendered as span bars across day, week, month, quarter or year buckets. Spans snap to whole buckets — this is a timeline, not a scheduling engine: no dependencies and no critical path.
Ghost card
- When a card has several values for the facet on an axis, it belongs in several cells at once. One placement shows the full card and the others render a faded copy, so a multi-valued card is visible everywhere it belongs without being duplicated. A per-person display setting, available on every plan — not to be confused with presence.
Presence
- Seeing who else has the board open, and watching the card a teammate is moving travel under their cursor in real time. A Team-plan feature, and distinct from live sync, which pushes content changes to everyone on Pro and Team.
MCP (Model Context Protocol)
- The open protocol AI clients such as Claude and Cursor use to call external tools. Glattice runs a remote MCP server behind OAuth 2.1, so an agent can read and write your boards through agent-focused workflows with your RLS permissions, attribution, audit trail, and rate limits.
Change history
- An append-only record of board-data writes: who made each write, when, and from which interface — browser, REST API, MCP, or the built-in AI bar. Ordinary user and product credentials cannot rewrite earlier entries. Thirty days on Free, a year on Pro, unlimited on Team.
Where to go next
The vocabulary makes more sense against a board that is using it.