Regolith
Regolith is the layer of soil and large bolders between the solid Bedrock and the Topsoil. In terms of the architecture of the next generation of AboutUs software, Regolith is the low level distributed object persistence framework that allows for the cool features of Topsoil.
Brandon CS Sanders is currently using this page as a scratchpad to think about Regolith as he develops the framework.
Collapsed
A collapsed object is the hash of an object that has been decomposed and serialized to a string.
Decomposition
Decomposition of objects allows you to have many compositional objects that share pieces. This is both a storage savings and it allows for the computation of back references. An essential feature of this is that the same expanded object always maps to the same collapsed object (hash).
Folded
Some objects such as Arrays and Hashes are themselves containers for other objects. During decomposition, the objects they contain must be collapsed and stored. Then a "folded" version of the original object is stored. The folded version replaces all top level objects in the container with the collapsed version of those objects.