| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| API key | A secret string that identifies your workspace to the API. You send it in the Authorization header of every request. See Authentication. |
| Asynchronous | The API accepts a request and answers immediately, before the work is done. You check back for the outcome. Searches work this way. See Search lifecycle. |
| Backoff | Waiting longer after each failed or repeated attempt, for example 2, 3, 5 and then 10 seconds, instead of retrying at a fixed fast pace. |
| Candidate | A company or person that might match your request and still has to be checked. Only candidates that match every requirement become results. |
| Catch-all domain | A company mail server that accepts mail for any address at its domain. An address at such a domain cannot be confirmed as a real mailbox, so its email_status is catch_all. |
| Credit | The unit you pay in. One credit is one US dollar. See Pricing and credits. |
| Criterion (plural: criteria) | A free-text requirement, such as “sells to hospitals”, that is checked against evidence for each candidate. See Three ways to search. |
| Cursor | A marker for your position in a list of results. You send it back as after to get the results that come next. See Poll and paginate. |
| Data provider | A company that supplies business data, such as company records, job listings or contact details. The Data API queries several on your behalf. See The data network. |
| Deduplication | Merging records so that the same company or person appears once, even when several data providers returned it. |
| Enrichment | Adding missing details to a record you already have, such as a work email for a known person. |
| Evidence | The proof that a requirement is true of a result: a summary, source links and supporting records. See Evidence and verdicts. |
| Filter | An exact condition on a named field, such as “employee count between 10 and 200”. See the filter reference. |
| Firmographics | Descriptive facts about a company, such as industry, size, location and revenue. The company equivalent of demographics. |
| Ideal customer profile (ICP) | A description of the kind of company most likely to buy from you. |
| Idempotency key | A unique string you attach to a request. If you send the same request again with the same key, the API returns the original result instead of doing the work twice. See Errors and retries. |
| Interpretation | How Avina read a plain-language query: the filters and criteria it produced. See Parse. |
| Persona | A saved description of who you want to reach at a company: job titles, how many people, and whether to look up email and phone. See Contacts with personas. |
| Polling | Asking for a search’s status repeatedly until it has finished. |
| Rate limit | The most requests an API key may make in a period of time. See Rate limits. |
| SDR | Sales development representative: a salesperson who finds and qualifies new prospects. Used in many examples in these docs. |
| Stop reason | Why a finished search stopped, such as target_reached. See Stop reasons. |
| Terminal status | A final status: completed, failed or cancelled. Once a search reaches one, it does not change again. |
| Verdict | The outcome of checking one requirement against one candidate: matched, not_matched or unknown. |
| Webhook | A URL on your server that another service calls when something happens. Webhooks for finished searches are coming soon. See Poll and paginate. |
| Workspace | Your organization’s account in Avina. API keys, credits and personas belong to a workspace. |
Glossary
Plain-language definitions of the terms used in the Avina Data API docs.
Short definitions of the terms these docs use, in alphabetical order. Each links to the page that covers it in depth.