Unclear glossary of ThreadsDB terms

[theefer]

There seem to be a lot of similar concepts that aren't fully explained in the docs. Collections allude to Stores, but it's not clear what the latter mean exactly. I'm not not entirely clear on the distinction between Thread and Database. A more exhaustive glossary of the terms and how they relate to each other would really help.

[carsonfarmer]

Thanks @theefer, very helpful. We're still in the 'first pass' phase of docs, so these types of tickets are super useful. Do you have a nice example of an effective glossary setup that you've seen elsewhere?

[theefer]

I'm not sure to be honest, maybe a start would be simply to make sure all terms are defined. https://docs.textile.io/threads/introduction/#basic-usage has many of them, but not "thread" or "store".

Actually thread is sort of defined as:

Everything above just looks like a Database, so what's a Thread? ThreadsDB combines the storage and management of data (the Database) with networking, access control, and replication over IPFS using the Threads Protocol. The Threads protocol has been extensively documented in the [whitepaper], but in short, Threads use private-key encryption to manage both security and identity among multiple parties that can access or edit the same Database.

But I'm not sure that paragraph necessarily makes it very clear what "a thread" is.

I'm also often a fan of diagrams that explain concepts and their relationships, but I know it's not always the easiest tool.