Glossary

Artemis has a vocabulary of its own. Some words, such as participation or result, mean something narrower in Artemis than in everyday speech, and a few components are known by names that do not describe them. This page defines the terms that appear in the code, the user interface, and the documentation, so that one word means one thing everywhere.

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Information:

This is a first draft. It lists the most common terms and is meant to grow: when a pull request introduces a term, or when a review discussion shows that two people understood one word differently, add a row here.

How the glossary is used

• Writing. Use the term in the first column. If the Avoid column lists a word, use the term instead, in the documentation, in code comments, in commit messages, and in pull request text.
• Checking. supporting_scripts/check_docs_consistency.py reads the Avoid column and fails when a page uses an avoided word. The check scans the prose of the pages, not the code blocks. To retire a word, add it to the column; to allow it again, remove it, and give the reason in the pull request.
• Related rules. The vague names for the two layers of a system are covered by Terminology, the wording about people by the language guideline.

Roles and course structure

Term	Meaning	Avoid
Course	The unit in which a group of users learns together. It holds exercises, lectures, exams, communication channels, and the course roles of its participants.
Student	A course role that takes part in the course and sees released content.
Teaching Assistant	A course role that assesses submissions and sees course content before its release date. The user interface and the code call this role tutor (tutors group).
Editor	A course role that creates and edits course content but cannot delete it.
Instructor	A course role that manages the course: content, participants, deletion, scores.
Admin	A global authority that administers the server. A Super Admin has additional privileges for security critical operations, such as managing other administrators.
Course role	The role of a user within one course. It grants access only in that course and never makes a user an administrator. See Access Rights.
Team	A group of students that work on a team exercise together and share one participation.
Tutorial group	A group of students of a course that meets regularly with a tutor. It is managed in the course.
Competency	A skill or knowledge area that a course aims to teach. Lectures, lecture units, and exercises are linked to it, and a student's progress is measured against it.
Learning path	The personalized sequence through the competencies of a course that Artemis suggests to a student.

Exercises, participations, and results

Term	Meaning	Avoid
Exercise	A task of a course that students solve and that Artemis can grade. There are five types: programming, quiz, modeling, text, and file upload.
Programming exercise	An exercise that students solve by pushing code to a git repository. Artemis builds and tests the code and creates a result.	coding exercise
Quiz exercise	An exercise made of multiple choice, short answer, or drag and drop questions. Artemis assesses it automatically.
Modeling exercise	An exercise in which students draw a diagram in the Apollon editor, for example a UML class diagram, an activity diagram or a BPMN process. It is assessed manually or with automatic feedback.
Text exercise	An exercise that students answer in free text. It is assessed manually or with suggestions from Athena.
File upload exercise	An exercise that students answer by uploading a file. It is assessed manually.
Participation	The connection between a student (or a team) and one exercise. It is created when the student starts the exercise and holds the submissions and results of that student. For a programming exercise it also points to the student's repository.
Submission	One answer of a participation. For a programming exercise, every push that creates a build is a submission.
Result	The outcome of assessing one submission: a score, the feedback, and whether the submission passed. A participation can have many results.
Feedback	One item of a result: the output of a test case, a finding of static code analysis, or a comment of an assessor.
Score	The percentage of the points of an exercise that a result earned.
Assessment	The act of grading a submission. It is automatic (tests, quizzes) or manual (a Teaching Assistant, optionally supported by Athena).
Grading instruction	A reusable comment with a fixed number of points that an assessor applies while assessing manually. Grading instructions are grouped in grading criteria.
Complaint	A student's objection to an assessed result, either a manual one or an automatic one of a programming exercise when the instructor enables complaints on automatic assessment. Another assessor reviews it and answers with a complaint response.
Grading scale	The mapping from the overall score of a course or exam to a grade.
Plagiarism check	The comparison of the submissions of an exercise with each other (JPlag for programming exercises). A match that an instructor investigates becomes a plagiarism case.

Programming exercise infrastructure

Term	Meaning	Avoid
Template repository	The repository with the code that every student starts from. A student's repository is copied from it.
Solution repository	The repository with the reference solution. It also checks that the tests pass.
Tests repository	The repository with the test cases of the exercise.
Auxiliary repository	An additional repository of the exercise, for example for files that students must not change.
Student repository	The repository of one participation, where a student or team works.
Test case	One automated check of a programming exercise. Its output becomes feedback.
Static code analysis	The check of the student code for style and quality problems with tools such as Checkstyle or PMD. Its findings become feedback grouped in categories.
LocalVC	The version control system that is built into Artemis: a git server that students and the build agents clone from and push to.
LocalCI	The continuous integration system that is built into Artemis: the server queues a build job and a build agent runs it in a Docker container.
Integrated Code Lifecycle	The combination of LocalVC and LocalCI. It is the supported setup for programming exercises.
Build job	One run of the tests for one submission, together with its status, logs, and result.
Build agent	A process that takes build jobs from the queue and runs them in Docker containers. It can run inside the core node or as a separate service on its own machine.
Build queue	The queue of build jobs that waits for a free build agent. It lives in the distributed data provider.
Jenkins	A deprecated external CI system for programming exercises. Its support is removed in Artemis 11.
Ares	The test framework for Java exercises that restricts what student code is allowed to do and stops it when it runs too long.

Exams

Term	Meaning	Avoid
Exam	A timed, supervised assessment of a course that consists of exercise groups.
Exercise group	A set of alternative exercises of an exam. Each student gets one of them.
Student exam	The individual instance of an exam that one student receives: the chosen exercises in the student's order.
Working time	The time that a student has to work on a student exam.
Test run	A trial run of an exam that an instructor does to check it before it is released.

Lectures and communication

Term	Meaning	Avoid
Lecture	A teaching unit of a course. It is made of lecture units.
Lecture unit	One part of a lecture: an attachment, a video, a text, an online link, or an exercise.
Channel	A communication space of a course that users join, for example one per lecture or exercise.
Conversation	The general name for a channel, a group chat, and a direct message.
Post	A message in a conversation. A reply to it is an answer post.
Notification	A message that Artemis sends to a user about an event of a course, in the client or as a push notification.
Hermes	The service through which Artemis delivers encrypted push notifications to the mobile apps.

Architecture and operation

Term	Meaning	Avoid
Client	The Angular application in src/main/webapp. Say web client when the difference to the mobile apps matters.
Server	The Spring Boot application in src/main/java.
Core node	A server instance that serves the client and the REST API and runs the scheduled tasks. A cluster has one or more core nodes.
Module	A package of the server below de.tum.cit.aet.artemis, such as exercise, exam, or localci, with its own API for the other modules.
Distributed data provider	The abstraction DistributedDataProvider that holds the state that nodes share (caches, queues, locks, maps). Hazelcast, Redis, and a local implementation are its providers. See Distributed Data.	distributed cache provider
Provider	A swappable implementation of the distributed data provider. Its glue code is an adapter.
Websocket topic	A declared destination that the server sends messages to and that the client subscribes to. Every topic is a constant: a broadcast topic has an access rule for its subscribers, a per-user topic reaches only the user that the server addresses. See Websocket.	web socket
Spring profile	A switch that enables parts of the server, such as core, buildagent, localvc, localci, scheduling, or dev.
Feature toggle	A switch that an administrator turns on or off at run time to enable a feature without a deployment.
Liquibase changeset	One step of the database migration. A changed schema always needs a new changeset.
DTO	A data transfer object: a Java record (or TypeScript interface) that carries data across the REST API, so that entities never leave the server.
TUM AET UI	The component library of the client in packages/tum-aet-ui.
Telemetry	The report about the configuration of an installation that Artemis sends to the maintainers. An administrator disables it with artemis.telemetry.enabled: false. See Telemetry.

Artificial intelligence and external services

Term	Meaning	Avoid
Iris	The virtual tutor in Artemis that students ask about exercises and lectures. It is backed by Pyris.
Pyris	The service of the EduTelligence suite behind Iris.
EduTelligence	The suite of AI services that extend Artemis, among them Pyris and Athena.
Athena	The service that suggests feedback for manual assessment.
Hyperion	The AI assisted authoring of exercises: consistency checks, rewriting, and variant generation. It runs inside Artemis and Spring AI.
Atlas	The module for competencies and learning paths.
Deimos	The instructor tool that screens programming exercise participations for malicious code.
AI worker	A process outside the server that runs long AI workloads, such as the generation of a whole exercise, and talks to Artemis through the distributed data provider.
Weaviate	The vector database that stores the search index of the global search.
Apollon	The UML editor that modeling exercises and quiz questions use.

Writing words

Term	Meaning	Avoid
Allowlist	A list of exceptions that a check accepts. Every entry says why it is allowed.	whitelist
Denylist	A list of values that a check or filter rejects.	blacklist